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There is no fool like an educated fool.

Margaret Atwood

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
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
It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Color Dust Water
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
MARGARET ATWOOD

Handmaid Need Tale Waste
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
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
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
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Character Gossip School
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fiction Planet Space
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 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
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Important Sound Think
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
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Inspirational Inspire Motivational
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Feel Invisible Made
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Conscience Hunger Powerful

There is no fool like an educated fool.

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There is no fool like an educated fool.

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