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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

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

Age Literature Young
I’m a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one’s life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Government People Real
we lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOOD

Gap Handmaid Stories Tale
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
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

Complicated Evil Sometimes
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Conscience Hunger Powerful
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
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Feel Invisible Made
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
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
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD

God Much Need
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Animal Environmental Meat
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Grow Survival Wood
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
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
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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