Margaret Atwood
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.
I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.Collection: Attitude
I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.Collection: Fate
In the end, we'll all become stories.Collection: Stories
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.Collection: Patience
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.Collection: Relationship
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.Collection: Democracy
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.Collection: Diversity
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.Collection: Real
Don't let the bastards grind you down.Collection: Graduation
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.Collection: Stupid
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.Collection: Alive
If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.Collection: Alive
The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.Collection: Philosophical
You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.Collection: People
Lose your temper and you lose the fight.Collection: Fighting
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.Collection: Events
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.Collection: Book
Where do the words go when we have said them?Collection: Said
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.Collection: Philosophy
Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Truth
The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.Collection: Real
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.Collection: Believe
Support your libraries... or else!Collection: Support
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.Collection: Sorry
Writing poetry is a state of free float.Collection: Writing
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?Collection: Food
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.Collection: Life
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.Collection: People
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.Collection: Expectations
a handful of crumpled starsCollection: Stars
One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.Collection: Unique
If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.Collection: Government
Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important.Collection: Important
You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.Collection: Too Much
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.Collection: Growing Up
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.Collection: Love
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.Collection: Love
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.Collection: Mother