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
Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.
Why are you so interested in amoebas?" "Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.
Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?
To want is to have a weakness.
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.