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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 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
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
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
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 did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Begin Country Paint People
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 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
I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Distract Multitasking Whim
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD

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

Age Literature Young
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
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
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
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Biography Decade End Stories

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

More Margaret Atwood Quotes