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 ATWOODWe 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.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
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In the end, we’ll all become stories.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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.
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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 -
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 -
There is no fool like an educated fool.
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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 -
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
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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.
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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.
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
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The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOOD