Margaret Atwood

She was awarded the O.C. (Officer of the Order of Canada) on December 17, 1973 and the C.C. (Companion of the Order of Canada) on June 21, 1981 for her services to literature.

Mother of Eleanor "Jess" Atwood Gibson born in 1976.

(June 2007) Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Is a big fan of George Orwell s novel "Nineteen Eight-Four" and Ridley Scott s film Blade Runner .

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

On childhood: Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one,another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Om growth: Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . I hold,inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

On writing: If I waited for perfection. . . I would never write a word.

[with Graeme Gibson, on the death of Farley Mowat] Farley was a great,and iconic Canadian who understood our environmental problems decades,before others did. He loved this country with a passion and threw,himself into the fray in wartime as well - also with a passion.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

How could I be sleeping with this particular man. . . . Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?,Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?,Potential has a shelf life.

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.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

We understand more than we know.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

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.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?,with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. … I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.

Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Fear is a powerful stimulant.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

War is what happens when language fails.

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

In the daylight we knowwhat’s gone is gone,but at night it’s different. Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;,from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

There is never only one, of anyone,As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter. . .

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings. . . but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

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

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

Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman. I think we found this frightening.

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

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

He was a dork, a dink, a dong… Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.

Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go. You could not believe I was more than your echo.

They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.

. . . Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

Debt . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

They were wrong about the sun. It does not go down into the underworld at night. The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges. It can happen at any moment. It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines. Plate, cup, knife. All at once there’s no blue, no green,no warning.

There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.

Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. 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 own day.

Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

I wonderif I should let my hair go greyso my advice will be better.

I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.

You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

Falling in love. . . how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing, the way you understood yourself.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying,If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

That’s what you get for being food.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it…. By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you…. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

« Stan wants to see them work the facial features, especially the smiles. He has a professional interest, from his job at Dimple. The Empathy Model he’d worked on could smile, but it was the same smile every time. Though what else did you need for checking out groceries? Put two eyes on anything and basically it looks like a face. »,Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark,Sauve qui peut. To survivewe’d all turn thiefand rascal, or so says the fox,with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,her white knife of a smile,who knows just where she’s going:to steal somethingthat doesn’t belong to her -some chicken, or one more chance,or other life.

Surviving Is the only warWe can afford,He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

i sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.

Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished.

I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon. . .

. . . yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink.

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance, it’s the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don’t count. I feel singled out, but also bereft.

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.

Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

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.

Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.

To want is to have a weakness.

I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?,To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing.

Some people write letters, in the library.

The internet is 95 percent porn and spam,Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

It can’t last forever. Others have thought suchthings, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’tlast forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!,Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.

What thumbsuckers we all are. . . when it comes to mothers.

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?,I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. . . . Providence appears to protect such women maybe out of astonishment.

Fear has a smell as Love does.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Sons branch out but one woman leads to another.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.

The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

For years I wanted to be older and now I am.

A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

A word after a word after a word is power.

If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom. .