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
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.
Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.
You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.
If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
My good intentions are completely lethal.
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.