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Anything That Suffers And Dies Instead Of Us Is Christ; If They Didn't Kill Birds And Fish They Would Have Killed Us. The Animals Die That We May Live, They Are Substitute People, Hunters In The Fall Killing The Deer, That Is Christ Also. And We Eat Them, Out Of Cans Or Otherwise; We Are Eaters Of Death, Dead Christ-flesh Resurrecting Inside Us, Granting Us Life. Canned Spam, Canned Jesus, Even The Plants Must Be Christ.

-Margaret Atwood

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Anything That Suffers And

Margaret Atwood

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Anything That Suffers And Dies Instead Of Us Is Christ; If They Didn't Kill Birds And Fish They Would Have Killed Us. The Animals Die That We May Live, They Are Substitute People, Hunters In The Fall Killing The Deer, That Is Christ Also. And We Eat Them, Out Of Cans Or Otherwise; We Are Eaters Of Death, Dead Christ-flesh Resurrecting Inside Us, Granting Us Life. Canned Spam, Canned Jesus, Even The Plants Must Be Christ.

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I Write As If I've Lived A Lot Of Things I Haven't Lived.

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Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.

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Bodily Functions

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There Would Be No Sherlock Holmes If It Were Not For Serial Publication.

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We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

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Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling. Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

A Rat In A Maze Is Free To Go Anywhere, As Long As It Stays Inside The Maze.

I Look Up At The Ceiling, Tracing The Foliage Of The Wreath. Today It Makes Me Think Of A Hat, The Large-brimmed Hats Women Used To Wear At Some Period During The Old Days: Hats Like Enormous Halos, Festooned With Fruit And Flowers, And The Feathers Of Exotic Birds; Hats Like An Idea Of Paradise, Floating Just Above The Head, A Thought Solidified.

The Myth That Everyone Once Read Great Literature Is Just A Myth.

Great Literature

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At Last You, Will Say (maybe Without Speaking) (there Are Mountains Inside Your Skull Garden And Chaos, Ocean And Hurricane; Certain Corners Of Rooms, Portraits Of Great-grandmothers, Curtains Of A Particular Shade; Your Deserts; Your Private Dinosaurs; The First Woman) All I Need To Know: Tell Me Everything Just As It Was From The Beginning.

A Non-event ... Is Better To Write About Than An Event, Because With A Non-event You Can Make Up The Meaning Yourself, It Means Whatever You Say It Means.

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.

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The Newspaper Stories Were Like Dreams To Us, Bad Dreams Dreamt By Others. How Awful, We Would Say, And They Were, But They Were Awful Without Being Believable. They Were Too Melodramatic, They Had A Dimension That Was Not The Dimension Of Our Lives. 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.

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.

A Ratio Of Failures Is Built Into The Process Of Writing. The Wastebasket Has Evolved For A Reason. Think Of It As The Altar Of The Muse Oblivion, To Whom You Sacrifice Your Botched First Drafts, The Tokens Of Your Human Imperfection.

Kill What You Can't Save What You Can't Eat Throw Out What You Can't Throw Out Bury What You Can't Bury Give Away What You Can't Give Away You Must Carry With You, It Is Always Heavier Than You Thought.

We All Know That A Book Is Not Really A Person. It Isn’t A Human Being. But If You Are A Lover Of Books As Books – As Objects, That Is – And Ignore The Human Element In Them – That Is, Their Voices – You Will Be Committing An Error Of The Soul, Because You Will Be An Idolator, Or Else A Fetishist.

To Live In Prison Is To Live Without Mirrors. To Live Without Mirrors Is To Live Without The Self. She Is Living Selflessly, She Finds A Hole In The Stone Wall And On The Other Side Of The Wall, A Voice. The Voice Comes Through Darkness And Has No Face. This Voice Becomes Her Mirror.

Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress.

Science Is Not Something That Exists Apart From Human Beings. It's One Of The Things We Do As Human Beings, And We Always Have Done Science And Technology In Some Form.

Nature Is To Zoos As God Is To Churches.

Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror.

Potential Has A Shelf Life.

Nobody Dies From Lack Of Sex. It's Lack Of Love We Die From.

We Have To Rethink Our Whole Energy Approach, Which Is Hard To Do Because We're So Dependent On Oil, Not Just For Fuel But Also Plastic. If Plastic Vanished, There Would Be Total Chaos. We Have To Think Quite Carefully About Using Oil, And Its Derivatives, Because It's Not Going To Be Around Forever.

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.

I Spent Much Of My Childhood In Northern Quebec, And Often There Was No Radio, No Television - There Wasn't A Lot To Entertain Us. When It Rained, I Stayed Inside Reading, Writing, Drawing.

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.

Optimism Means Better Than Reality; Pessimism Means Worse Than Reality. I'm A Realist.

I Would Like To Believe This Is A Story I’m Telling. I Need To Believe It. I Must Believe It. Those Who Can Believe That Such Stories Are Only Stories Have A Better Chance. If It’s A Story I’m Telling, Then I Have Control Over The Ending. Then There Will Be An Ending, To The Story, And Real Life Will Come After It. I Can Pick Up Where I Left Off.

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.

Falling In Love

So Much For Endings. Beginnings Are Always More Fun. True Connoisseurs, However, Are Known To Favor The Stretch In Between, Since It's The Hardest To Do Anything With. That's About All That Can Be Said For Plots, Which Anyway Are Just One Thing After Another, A What And A What And A What.

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 Doll You Need To Sleep. Well, All Children Are Sad But Some Get Over It. Count Your Blessings. Better Than That, Buy A Hat. Buy A Coat Or A Pet. Take Up Dancing To Forget.

The Object Is Very Clear In The Fight Against Racism; You Have Reasons Why You're Opposed To It. But When You're Writing A Novel, You Don't Want The Reader To Come Out Of It Voting Yes Or No To Some Question. Life Is More Complicated Than That.

The Problem With Meditating Is I Generally Go To Sleep, And That's Because I'm Doing It Wrong.

And She Finds It Difficult To Believe—that A Person Would Love Her Even When She Isn't Trying. Trying To Figure Out What Other People Need, Trying To Be Worthy.

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.

...we Must Be A Beacon Of Hope, Because If You Tell People There's Nothing They Can Do, They Will Do Worse Than Nothing.

You Need A Certain Amount Of Nerve To Be A Writer.

Where Do The Words Go When We Have Said Them?

Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Understand The Dead, I've Found; But Nothing Is More Dangerous Than To Ignore Them.

But Maybe Boredom Is Erotic, When Women Do It, For Men.

You Can’t Buy It, But It Has A Price,” Said Oryx. “everything Has A Price.

We've Learned To See The World In Gasps.

Publishing A Book Is Like Stuffing A Note Into A Bottle And Hurling It Into The Sea.

It's Clear, It's Fresh, Like A Mint Candy.

Popular Art Is The Dream Of Society; It Does Not Examine Itself.

I Hate To Tell You This, But You Will Never Actually Go To A Galaxy Far, Far Away And Encounter Darth Vader. That's Science Fiction; It Isn't Going To Happen.

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Dennis Bergkamp

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