I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
MARGARET ATWOODI 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.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
-
-
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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 -
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 -
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’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 -
The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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 -
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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