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
Where do the words go when we have said them?
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.
For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.
Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?