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
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Men and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same." Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean.
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
It's in Macbeth: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon." I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!
A word after a word after a word is power.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.