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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

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
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
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
I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
MARGARET ATWOOD

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

Color Dust Water
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Awkward Boys Girl
Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Emotion Love Piss
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
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Air Love Sleep Unnoticed
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Biography Decade End Stories
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Conscience Hunger Powerful
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
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
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

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?

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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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Atwood Quotes