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
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.
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
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They've removed anything you can tie a rope to.
Once upon a time you could wander around one country, then the next and then maybe you'd go to England or wherever. Now they all want you to do it at the same time and you can't. It's just not physically possible.
I'm curious. If someone says 'Don't open that door', I'm right there!
The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers - it's given them that extra push, and that extra dollop of confidence.
They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to
I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way.
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.