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Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.

Margaret Atwood

We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Shelves Silent Use
I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Children Fall Summer
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they’re not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They’re a group phenomenon, they’re not very fast, they’re quite sickly. So what’s the pleasure of being one?
MARGARET ATWOOD

Animal Forever Joy
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Art Light Shine
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Age Literature Young
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Ignorant Shame Way
The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Debt Government Run
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Biography Decade End Stories
I’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bad Hero Pick Theory
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Hurt Intention Need Someone
When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Art Civilization Dust
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Body Embroider Eye Leg
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fight Racism Write
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Dignity Ignorance Poetry
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Feel Invisible Made
These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Alive Fact Prayer
I’m from the generation that had the boys’ door and the girls’ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Boy Girl School
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fiction Planet Space
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Conscience Hunger Powerful
we lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOOD

Gap Handmaid Stories Tale
There is no fool like an educated fool.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Educated Emotional Fool People
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Century Novelist Once Time Upon
Immortality,’ said Crake, ‘ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Absence Baby Immortality
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Good Light Stick Stories
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fear Lying Night
Confronted by too much emptiness … the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOOD

Island Loneliness Water

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.

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Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Atwood Quotes