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Margaret Atwood

" More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die? "

Margaret Atwood

Nothing

related quotes

" 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. "

Margaret Atwood

Reading

" 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. "

Margaret Atwood

Community , Journey

" I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading ‚Äî the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story ‚Äî and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play. "

Margaret Atwood

Reading

" As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day. "

Margaret Atwood

History

" How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. "

Margaret Atwood

Humanity , Empathy

" Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that‚Äôs our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving. "

Margaret Atwood

Humanity

" What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time. "

Margaret Atwood

Career

" In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. "

Margaret Atwood

Nature , Spring

" Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. "

Margaret Atwood

Nature

" Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run... "

Margaret Atwood

Nature

" As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me. "

Margaret Atwood

Nature , Money

" ...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91] "

Margaret Atwood

Nature

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