Margaret Atwood

"Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot. You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait, you would jump with the light still in you."

"Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?"

"Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed."

"You're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill,or hug your sadness like an eyeless dollyou need to sleep. Well, all children are sadbut some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that,buy a hat. Buy a coat or a pet. Take up dancing to forget."

"There is the staircase,there is the sun. There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage. You stand red-handed. You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass What are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different. Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."

"Writing poetry is a state of free float"

"Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic. Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, that litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things that men are simply not equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this believe about men; nonetheless, it has its uses."

"UPYou wake up filled with dread. There seems no reason for it. Morning light sifts through the window,there is birdsong,you can't get out of bed. It's something about the crumpled sheetshanging over the edge like junglefoliage, the terry slippers gapingtheir dark pink mouths for your feet,the unseen breakfast--some of itin the refrigerator you do not dareto open--you will not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future tense,immense as outer space. You could get lost there. No. Nothing so simple. The past, its densityand drowned events pressing you down,like sea water, like gelatinfilling your lungs instead of air. Forget all that and let's get up. Try moving your arm. Try moving your head. Pretend the house is on fireand you must run or burn. No, that one's useless. It's never worked before. Where is it coming form, this echo,this huge No that surrounds you,silent as the folds of the yellowcurtains, mute as the cheerful Mexican bowl with its cargoof mummified flowers?(You chose the colours of the sun,not the dried neutrals of shadow. God knows you've tried.)Now here's a good one:you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have neededall these years to forgive?"

"A lot of people call you a feminist painter."What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?"

"Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times."

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

"Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships..."

"Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome."

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit."

"You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead. As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society. As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes you'll feel you're speaking for it, sometimes -- when it's taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak 'for women,' or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you'll end up two-dimensional."Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs."

"If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know."

"What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp."

"The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose."

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."

"To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward."