Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSCis a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 November 1939
CityOttawa, Canada
CountryCanada
I think of this as a democratizing device.
. . . time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
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. Reality simply consists of different points of view.
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Snowman wakes before dawn.
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Inside the peach, there is a stone.
The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.
Either I'm alive or I'm dying, she said to Daniel. Please don't feel you can't tell me. Which is it? Which does it feel like? said Daniel. He patted her hand. You're not dead yet. You're a lot more alive than many people. This isn't good enough for Rennie. She wants something definite, the real truth, one way or the other. Then she will know what she should do next. It's this suspension, hanging in a void, this half-life she can't bear. She can't bear not knowing. She doesn't want to know.
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.