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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.

-Margaret Atwood

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At Last You, Will

Margaret Atwood

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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.

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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.

The Way Love Feels Is Always Only Approximate. 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.

All Stories Are About Wolves. All Worth Repeating, That Is. Anything Else Is Sentimental Drivel. ...think About It. There's Escaping From The Wolves, Fighting The Wolves, Capturing The Wolves, Taming The Wolves. Being Thrown To The Wolves, Or Throwing Others To The Wolves So The Wolves Will Eat Them Instead Of You. Running With The Wolf Pack. Turning Into A Wolf. Best Of All, Turning Into The Head Wolf. No Other Decent Stories Exist.

Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

Show Me A Character Totally Without Anxieties And I Will Show You A Boring Book.

The Astrologers Would Tell That The U.s. Is Ruled By Fire And Canada Is Ruled By Water. Short Version: You Pep Us Up, We Cool You Down.

Myths Can't Be Translated As They Did In Their Ancient Soil. We Can Only Find Our Own Meaning In Our Own Time.

It Used To Be That Your Bloodlines Dictated Who You Were. But The U.s. Became The Land Of The Self-made Man, In Which Not Only Did You Make A Fortune But You Could Make Up Everything Else About Yourself As Well. You Move Into A New Town With A Spurious Pedigreed Background And You Just Make Yourself Up.

When You Are In The Middle Of A Story It Isn't A Story At All, But Only A Confusion; A Dark Roaring, A Blindness, A Wreckage Of Shattered Glass And Splintered Wood; Like A House In A Whirlwind, Or Else A Boat Crushed By The Icebergs Or Swept Over The Rapids, And All Aboard Powerless To Stop It. It's Only Afterwards That It Becomes Anything Like A Story At All. When You Are Telling It, To Yourself Or To Someone Else.

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.

I Believe In The Resistance As I Believe There Can Be No Light Without Shadow; Or Rather, No Shadow Unless There Is Also Light.

... 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.

When Faced With The Inevitable, You Always Have A Choice... As I Learned During My Liberal Arts Education, Any Symbol Can Have, In The Imaginative Context, Two Versions, A Positive And A Negative... If You Spill Your Milk You're Left With A Glass Which Is Either Half Empty Or Half Full... 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.

You Can Forget Who You Are If You're Alone Too Much.

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.

Vanity Is Becoming A Nuisance, I Can See Why Women Give It Up, Eventually. But I'm Not Ready For That Yet.

Why Is It We Want So Badly To Memorialize Ourselves? Even While We're Still Alive. We Wish To Assert Our Existence, Like Dogs Peeing On Fire Hydrants. We Put On Display Our Framed Photographs, Our Parchment Diplomas, Our Silver-plated Cups; We Monogram Our Linen, We Carve Our Names On Trees, We Scrawl Them On Washroom Walls. It's All The Same Impulse. What Do We Hope From It? Applause, Envy, Respect? Or Simply Attention, Of Any Kind We Can Get? At The Very Least We Want A Witness. We Can't Stand The Idea Of Our Own Voices Falling Silent Finally, Like A Radio Running Down.

We Are Silent, Considering Shortfalls. There's Not Much Time Left, For Us To Become What We Once Intended. Jon Had Potential, But It's Not A Word That Can Be Used Comfortably Any More. Potential Has A Shelf-life.

In Paradise There Are No Stories, Because There Are No Journeys.

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

As With All Knowledge, Once You Knew It, You Couldn't Imagine How It Was That You Hadn't Known It Before.

At Moments Like This I Envy Those Who Have Found A Safe Haven In Which To Bestow Their Hearts; Or Perhaps I Envy Them For Having A Heart To Bestow. I Often Feel That I Myself Am Without One, And Possess In Its Stead Merely A Heart Shaped Stone.

Writing Poetry Is A State Of Free Float.

When We're Young, We Like Happy Endings. When We're A Little Older, We Think Happy Endings Are Unrealistic And So We Prefer Bad But Credible Endings. When We're Older Still, We Realize Happy Endings Aren't So Bad After All.

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.

Debt Is Part Of The Human Condition. Civilization Is Based On Exchanges - On Gifts, Trades, Loans - And The Revenges And Insults That Come When They Are Not Paid Back.

No Matter How Much You've Been Warned, Death Always Comes Without Knocking. Why Now? Is The Cry. Why So Soon? It's The Cry Of A Child Being Called Home At Dusk.

To Take That Risk, To Offer Life And Remain Alive, Open Yourself Like This And Become Whole.

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

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.

We Still Think Of A Powerful Man As A Born Leader And A Powerful Woman As An Anomaly.

Genres Aren't Closed Boxes. Stuff Flows Back And Forth Across The Borders All The Time.

Women Are Human Beings, And Human Beings Are A Very Mixed Lot. I've Always Been Against The Idea That Women Were Victorian Angels, That They Could Do No Wrong. I've Always Thought It Was Horseshit And Does Nobody Any Good. Remember, Lizzie Borden Got Off Largely Because The Cultural Agenda Had Convinced People That Women Were Morally Superior To Men, So Lizzie Borden Was "incapable" Of Taking The Ax And Giving Her Mother 40 Whacks.

We're Facing Growing Climate Change, More Floods, More Droughts, More Crisis On A Planetary Level, And The Systems We Put In Place In The Twentieth Century Are Just Not Going To Work. We've Run Out Of Stuff. Our Big Problems Are Going To Be Energy Supplies And Food Supplies. This Is Not A Right-left Issue. It's A People Issue, And It Cuts Across All Our Categories.

There Were No Men In This Painting, But It Was About Men, The Kind Who Caused Women To Fall. I Did Not Ascribe Any Intentions To These Men. They Were Like The Weather, They Didn't Have A Mind. They Merely Drenched You Or Struck You Like Lightning And Moved On, Mindless As Blizzards. Or They Were Like Rocks, A Line Of Sharp Slippery Rocks With Jagged Edges. You Could Walk With Care Along Between The Rocks, Picking Your Steps, And If You Slipped You'd Fall And Cut Yourself, But It Was No Use Blaming The Rocks.

Lose Your Temper And You Lose The Fight.

In View Of The Fading Animals The Proliferation Of Sewers And Fears The Sea Clogging, The Air Nearing Extinction We Should Be Kind, We Should Take Warning, We Should Forgive Each Other Instead We Are Opposite, We Touch As Though Attacking, The Gifts We Bring Even In Good Faith Maybe Warp In Our Hands To Implements, To Manoeuvres

A Wave Of Blood Goes Up To My Head, My Stomach Shrinks Together, As If Something Dangerous Has Just Missed Hitting Me. It's As If I've Been Caught Stealing, Or Telling A Lie; Or As If I've Heard Other People Talking About Me, Saying Bad Things About Me, Behind My Back. There's The Same Flush Of Shame, Of Guilt And Terror, And Of Cold Disgust With Myself. But I Don't Know Where These Feelings Have Come From, What I've Done.

His Father Was Self-made, But His Mother Was Constructed By Others, And Such Edifices Are Notoriously Fragile.

The Act Of Making A Photograph Is Less A Question Of What Is Being Looked At Than How.

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. The Painless Ones Go Around Putting Their Hands On Hot Stoves, Freezing Their Feet To The Point Of Gangrene, Scalding The Lining Of Their Throats With Boiling Coffee, Because There Is No Warning Anguish. Evolution Does Not Favour Them. So Too Perhaps With The Fearless Women, Because There Aren't Very Many Of Them Around. ... Providence Appears To Protect Such Women, Maybe Out Of Astonishment.

Ordinary, Said Aunt Lydia, Is What You Are Used To. This May Not Seem Ordinary To You Now, But After A Time It Will. It Will Become Ordinary.

When I Was 16, I Started Publishing All Kinds Of Things In School Magazines.

For Me The Novel Is A Social Vehicle, It Reflects Society.

It Is My Contention That The Process Of Reading Is Part Of The Process Of Writing, The Necessary Completion Without Which Writing Can Hardly Be Said To Exist.

Is Anything Wrong, Dear? The Old Joke Went. No, Why? You Moved. Just Don't Move.

Blondes Are Like White Mice, You Only Find Them In Cages. They Wouldn’t Last Long In Nature. They’re Too Conspicuous.

Now I Can See How That Can Happen. You Can Fall In Love With Anybody--a Fool, A Criminal, A Nothing. There Are No Good Rules.

Falling In Love

Messy Love Is Better Than None, I Guess. I Am No Authority On Sane Living.

The Reason They Invented Coffins, To Lock The Dead In, Preserve Them, They Put Makeup On Them; They Didn't Want Them Spreading Or Changing Into Anything Else. The Stone With The Name And Date Was On Them To Weight Them Down.

All Observations Of Life Are Harsh, Because Life Is. I Lament That Fact, But I Cannot Change It.

Reality Simply Consists Of Different Points Of View.

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.

The Cemetery Has ... An Inscription: 'though I Walk Through The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, It Does Feel Deceptively Safer With Two; But Thou Is A Slippery Character. Every Thou I've Known Has Had A Way Of Going Missing.

Every Ending Is Arbitrary, Because The End Is Where You Write The End. A Period, A Dot Of Punctuation, A Point Of Stasis. A Pinprick In The Paper: You Could Put Your Eye To It And See Through, To The Other Side, To The Beginning Of Something Else. Or, As Tony Says To Her Students, Time Is Not A Solid, Like Wood, But A Fluid, Like Water Or The Wind. It Doesn't Come Neatly Cut Into Even-sized Length, Into Decades And Centuries. Nevertheless, For Our Purposes We Have To Pretend It Does. The End Of Any History Is A Lie In Which We All Agree To Conspire.

There Were A Lot Of Gods. Gods Always Come In Handy, They Justify Almost Anything.

Disease Has Always Been A Much Bigger Killer Of Human Beings Than Wars.

Foreignness Is All Around. Only In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country, Namely The Heart Of The United States, Can You Avoid Such A Thing. In The Center Of An Empire, You Can Think Of Your Experience As Universal. Outside The Empire Or On The Fringes Of The Empire, You Cannot.

I Wanted To Forget The Past, But It Refused To Forget Me; It Waited For Sleep, Then Cornered Me.

So Crake Never Remembered His Dreams. It's Snowman That Remembers Them Instead. Worse Than Remembers: He's Immersed In Them, He'd Wading Through Them, He's Stuck In Them. Every Moment He's Lived In The Past Few Months Was Dreamed First By Crake. No Wonder Crake Screamed So Much.

I've Been Involved In Activities With Other People Who Were Put In Jail. We Were Protesting The Closing Of The Prison Farm Program At The Prison I Used In A Previous Book, Alias Grace. Some Of Us Also Put Up Money In Order To Save The Heirloom Herd Of Cows There. So I Own Half A Cow!

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.

Perhaps Its Not The World That Is Soundless But We Who Are Deaf.

But Remember That Forgiveness Too Is A Power. To Beg For It Is A Power, And To Withhold Or Bestow It Is A Power, Perhaps The Greatest. Maybe None Of This Is About Control. Maybe It Isn't Really About Who Can Own Whom, Who Can Do What To Whom And Get Away With It, Even As Far As Death. Maybe It Isn't About Who Can Sit And Who Has To Kneel Or Stand Or Lie Down, Legs Spread Open. Maybe It's About Who Can Do What To Whom And Be Forgiven For It. Never Tell Me It Amounts To The Same Thing.

I'm With The Spirit Of Earth-day-yet-to-come. Nobody Can Really Predict The Future, All You Can Do Is Look At Trends, And That Could Change At Any Moment.

I'm The Only Person You've Ever Met Who Has Read Longfellow.

Walter Turned On The Radio: Electric Violins Wailing, Twisted Romance, The Four-square Beat Of Heartbreak. Trite Suffering, But Suffering Nonetheless. The Entertainment Business. What Voyeurs We Have All Become.

The Problem Is Huge. We've Just Added Seventy-five Million People To The Already Large Proportion Of People In The World Who Are Malnourished All The Time, Whose Bodies Are Being Starved.

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.

The Sands Of Time Are Quicksands ... So Much Can Sink Into Them Without A Trace.

Without A Trace

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.

Gardening Is Not A Rational Act. What Matters Is The Immersion Of The Hands In The Earth, That Ancient Ceremony Of Which The Pope Kissingthe Tarmac Is Merely A Pallid Vestigial Remnant.

As An Artist Your First Loyalty Is To Your Art. Unless This Is The Case, You're Going To Be A Second-rate Artist. I Don't Mean There's Never Any Overlap. You Learn Things In One Area And Bring Them Into Another Area. But Giving A Speech Against Racism Is Not The Same As Writing A Novel. 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. Reality Simply Consists Of Different Points Of View.

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.

...and Nostalgia Swept Through Jimmy Like A Sudden Hunger.

We Thought We Had Such Problems. How Were We To Know We Were Happy?

Remember,' She'd Tell Her Staff, 'every Customer Wants To Feel Like A Princess, And Princesses Are Selfish And Overbearing.

If You're Not Annoying Somebody, You're Not Really Alive.

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

I Don't Know Why They Are All So Eager To Be Remembered. What Good Will It Do Them? There Are Some Things That Should Be Forgotten By Everyone, And Never Spoken Of Again.

If You're A Woman Writer, Sometime, Somewhere, You Will Be Asked: Do You Think Of Yourself As A Writer First, Or As A Woman First? Look Out. Whoever Asks This Hates And Fears Both Writing And Women.

When Things Are Really Dismal, You Can Laugh, Or You Can Cave In Completely.

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.

We Should Take A Lesson From The Irish Potato Famine: Monocultures Are Vulnerable. Monocultures Of Any Kind Are Very Vulnerable, Because One Change And You're Cooked. So We Should Be Diversifying, Wouldn't You Say?

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.

All It Takes,” Said Crake, “is The Elimination Of One Generation. One Generation Of Anything. Beetles, Trees, Microbes, Scientists, Speakers Of French, Whatever. Break The Link In Time Between One Generation And The Next, And It’s Game Over Forever.

You Want The Truth, Of Course. You Want Me To Put Two And Two Together. But Two And Two Doesn’t Necessarily Get You The Truth. Two And Two Equals A Voice Outside The Window. Two And Two Equals The Wind. The Living Bird Is Not Its Labeled Bones.

There's Blood, A Taste I Remember. It Tastes Of Orange Popsicles, Penny Gumballs, Red Licorice, Gnawed Hair, Dirty Ice.

Pink Is Supposed To Weaken Your Enemies, Make Them Go Soft On You, Which Must Be Why It's Used For Baby Girls. It's A Wonder The Military Hasn't Got On To This.

Gravity Works In Your Life, The Notion Of Free Will Works In Your Life, However Problematic It May At Times Be.

Confronted By Too Much Emptiness ... The Brain Invents. Loneliness Creates Company As Thirst Creates Water. How Many Sailors Have Been Wrecked In Pursuit Of Islands That Were Merely A Shimmering?

I'm A Person Of Whim, And Easily Distracted. I Don't Like Multitasking. When I'm Doing One Thing, I Like To Do Just That Thing.

Waste Not Want Not. I Am Not Being Wasted. Why Do I Want?

I Am Nervous About Dogmas Of Any Kind, Whether They Be Religious, Political, Or Anti-religious. Too Many Heads Have Rolled Because Of Them.

She Knows Herself To Be At The Mercy Of Events, And She Knows By Now That Events Have No Mercy.

One Of The Reasons [william] Shakespeare Is So Endlessly Fascinating Is That You Can Look At That Figure From About 10 Different Angles: Caliban In Shakespeare's Day Was Probably Viewed As A Sort Of Comic, Barbarian Type, But Into The 19th Century There Were Productions Where Caliban Was The Hero. He's A Potential Rapist Of A Minor. Is That A Good Thing? No, It Is Not. On The Other Hand, Prospero's Got Him Cooped Up In A Cave And Tortures Him If He Doesn't Do What Prospero Wants. Is That A Good Thing? No. Shakespeare Doesn't Let You Off Easy.

What A Lost Person Needs Is A Map Of The Territory, With His Own Position Marked On It So He Can See Where He Is In Relation To Everything Else.

I'm Working On My Own Life Story. I Don't Mean I'm Putting It Together; No, I'm Taking It Apart.

The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read.

That Is What You Have To Do Before You Kill, I Thought. You Have To Create An It, Where None Was Before.

All Fathers Are Invisible In Daytime; Daytime Is Ruled By Mothers And Fathers Come Out At Night. Darkness Brings Home Fathers, With Their Real, Unspeakable Power. There Is More To Fathers Than Meets The Eye.

It's Probably A Form Of Childish Curiosity That Keeps Me Going As A Fiction Writer. I ... Want To Open Everybody's Bureau Drawers And See What They Keep In There. I'm Nosy.

I Was Born In The Ottawa General Hospital Right After The Gray Cup Football Game In 1939. Six Months Later, I Was Backpacked Into The Quebec Bush. I Grew Up In And Out Of The Bush, In And Out Of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie And Toronto.

I No Longer Feel I'll Be Dead By Thirty; Now It's Sixty. I Suppose These Deadlines We Set For Ourselves Are Really A Way Of Saying We Appreciate Time, And Want To Use All Of It. I'm Still Writing, I'm Still Writing Poetry, I Still Can't Explain Why, And I'm Still Running Out Of Time.

I Began To Forget Myself In The Middle Of Sentences.

I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.

There's An Epigram Tacked To My Office Bulletin Board, Pinched From A Magazine -- "wanting To Meet An Author Because You Like His Work Is Like Wanting To Meet A Duck Because You Like Pâté.

The Past Is A Closed Door.

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.

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.

Time Folds You In Its Arms And Gives You One Last Kiss, And Then It Flattens You Out And Folds You Up And Tucks You Away Until It's Time For You To Become Someone Else's Past Time, And Then Time Folds Again.

Things Might Have Been Different If She Hadn't Been Able To Drift; If She'd Had To Concentrate On Her Next Meal, Instead Of Dwelling On All The Injuries She Felt We'd Done Her. An Unearned Income Encourages Self-pity In Those Already Prone To It.

Don't Be Married To A Line Or Verse If It Can't Rhyme, Fit The Meter, Or Doesn't Fit The Outline.

The Short Answer To 'why Do You Write' Is - I Suppose I Write For Some Of The Same Reasons I Read: To Live A Double Life; To Go Places I Haven't Been; To Examine Life On Earth; To Come To Know People In Ways, And At Depths, That Are Otherwise Impossible; To Be Surprised.

The Human Moral Keyboard Is Limited ... There's Nothing You Can Play On It That Hasn't Been Played Before. And, My Dear Friends, I Am Sorry To Say This, But It Has Its Lower Notes.

There Is So Much Going On All Over The World That It's Impossible For One Person To Keep Up. And I Can't.

He Has To Find More And Better Ways Of Occupying His Time. His Time, What A Bankrupt Idea, As If He's Been Given A Box Of Time Belonging To Him Alone, Stuffed To The Brim With Hours And Minutes That He Can Spend Like Money. Trouble Is, The Box Has Holes In It And The Time Is Running Out, No Matter What He Does With It.

Reading ... Changes You. You Aren't The Same Person After You've Read A Particular Book As You Were Before, And You Will Read The Next Book, Unless Both Are Harlequin Romances, In A Slightly Different Way.

Come Away With Me, He Said, We Will Live On A Desert Island. I Said, I Am A Desert Island. It Was Not What He Had In Mind.

Amazing How The Heart Clutches At Anything Familiar, Whimpering Mine!mine!

My Parents Were Gardeners Themselves, And Perforce They Used Environmental Techniques Because It Was During The War, And You Didn't Have The New Sorts Of Chemicals.

Truly Amazing, What People Can Get Used To, As Long As There Are A Few Compensations.

Axiom: You Are A Sea. Your Eye- Lids Curve Over Chaos My Hands Where They Touch You, Create Small Inhabited Islands Soon You Will Be All Earth: A Known Land, A Country.

Nature Is To Zoos As God Is To Churches.

I Was Sand, I Was Snow—written On, Rewritten, Smoothed Over.

No Luck Was Dumb Because Luck Was Just Another Name For Miracle.

I Feel Like Cotton Candy: Sugar And Air. Squeeze Me And I’d Turn Into A Small Sickly Damp Wad Of Weeping Pinky-red.

The World Is Being Run By People My Age, Men My Age, With Falling-out Hair And Health Worries, And It Frightens Me. When The Leaders Were Older Than Me I Could Believe In Their Wisdom, I Could Believe They Had Transcended Rage And Malice And The Need To Be Loved. Now I Know Better. I Look At The Faces In Newspapers, In Magazines, And Wonder: What Greeds, What Furies Drive Them On?

I Didn't Want Him To Become Gray And Multi-dimensional And Complicated Like Everyone Else. Was Every Heathcliff A Linton In Disguise?

And Yes, I Know It's You; And That Is What We Will Come To, Sooner Or Later, When It's Even Darker Than It Is Now, When The Snow Is Colder, When It's Darkest And Coldest And Candles Are No Longer Any Use To Us And The Visibility Is Zero: Yes. It's Still You. It's Still You.

Fiction Is Not Necessarily About What You Know, It's About How You Feel. That Is The Truth About Fiction, And The Other Truth Is That All Science Is A Tool, And We Use Our Tools Not To Actualise What We Know, But To Implement How We Feel.

This Is What I Miss, Cordelia: Not Something That’s Gone, But Something That Will Never Happen. Two Old Women Giggling Over Their Tea.

In The Evenings There's Been Thunder, A Distant Bumping And Stumbling, Like God On A Sullen Binge.

Once In A While, Jimmy Would Make Up A Word But He Never Once Got Caught Out. ... He Should Have Been Pleased By His Success With These Verbal Fabrications, But Instead He Was Depressed By It. The Memos Telling Him He'd Done A Good Job Meant Nothing To Him; All They Proved Was That No One Was Capable Of Appreciating How Clever He Had Been. He Came To Understand Why Serial Killers Sent Helpful Clues To The Police.

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

Canadians Are Fond Of A Good Disaster, Especially If It Has Ice, Water, Or Snow In It. You Thought The National Flag Was About A Leaf, Didn't You? Look Harder. It's Where Someone Got Axed In The Snow.

As All Historians Know, The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Echoes.

The Goals Of The Feminist Movement Have Not Been Achieved, And Those Who Claim We're Living In A Post-feminist Era Are Either Sadly Mistaken Or Tired Of Thinking About The Whole Subject.

Teaching Other People To Write Is Not Something I Can Do. The Only Kind Of Advice I Can Give Them Will Be Trite By Its Nature. Of Course, Read A Lot, Write A Lot. The Kind Of Advice I Wish I Had Been Given Is All Of A Practical Nature, Having To Do With Publishers And Agents.

The Bell That Measures Time Is Ringing

Wars Happen Because The Ones Who Start Them Think They Can Win.

The Moment Of Betrayal Is The Worst, The Moment When You Know Beyond Any Doubt That You've Been Betrayed: That Some Other Human Being Has Wished You That Much Evil

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.

If One Of The Arguments Against Eating Meat Is To Do With Cruelty And Animal Intelligence, Then Lab Meat Avoids That. There's Also The Environmental Argument For It.

For Drinking Life There Are Two Cups: The No Cup Is Bitter, The Yes Cup Is Yummy -- Now, Which One Would You Rather Have In Your Tummy?

Religions In General Have To Rediscover Their Roots. In Hinduism And The Koran, Animals Are Described As Equals. If You Walk Into A Cathedral And Look At The Decorations Of Early Christianity, There Are Vines, Animals, Creatures And Birds Thriving All Over The Stonework.

As William Gibson Says, The Future Is Already Here But It's Lumpy. It's Unevenly Distributed. Some People Are Already Living This, The Ones On Low-lying Islands Off The Coast Of India Are Being Swept Away, You Know, It's Already Happening To Some People. We Happen To Be Very Lucky So Far.

You Need A Certain Amount Of Nerve To Be A Writer, An Almost Physical Nerve, The Kind You Need To Walk A Log Across A River.

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.

You Can't Help What You Feel, But You Can Help How You Behave

I Read A Piece By A Guy Out In Alberta That Said Canadians Are Lazy Because They're Not Patenting Enough New Inventions. I Disagree. Canadians Invent A Lot Of Stuff. Actually Patenting Them Is Expensive.

Farewells Can Be Shattering, But Returns Are Surely Worse. Solid Flesh Can Never Live Up To The Bright Shadow Cast By Its Absence. Time And Distance Blur The Edges; Then Suddenly The Beloved Has Arrived, And It's Noon With Its Merciless Light, And Every Spot And Pore And Wrinkle And Bristle Stands Clear.

One Of The Gravestones In The Cemetery Near The Earliest Church Has An Anchor On It And An Hourglass, And The Words In Hope. In Hope. Why Did They Put That Above A Dead Person? Was It The Corpse Hoping, Or Those Still Alive?

Little Girls Are Cute And Small Only To Adults. To One Another They Are Not Cute. They Are Life-sized.

Which Of Us Can Resist The Temptation Of Being Thought Indispensable?

I Grew Up Amongst Biologists.

Some Of Our Earliest Writing, In Cuneiform, Was About Who Owes What.

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

In My Dreams Of This City I Am Always Lost.

[my Favorite Word Is] And. It Is So Hopeful.

Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.

I Did Not Know How To Paint Or Even What To Paint, But I Knew I Had To Begin.

I Am Not Running For Mayor Yet. But If It Comes To Be True That People Cannot Voice An Opinion Unless They Have Been Elected, Then We Are No Longer In A Democracy.

Stupidity Is The Same As Evil If You Judge By The Results.

The Truth Is Seldom Welcome, Especially At Dinner.

You Cannot Teach Somebody To Write A Masterpiece, But You Can Certainly Teach Them How To Improve Their Writing Skills. And You Can Teach Them That They Can Make Their Own Voices More Effective By Being Able To Communicate More Clearly And Forcefully. It Makes People Feel More Capable When They Can Write - For Instance To Make A Request - Of A Politician - And When They Are Able To Receive A Reply.

Some Travelers Think They Want To Go To Foreign Places But Are Dismayed When The Places Turn Out Actually To Be Foreign.

But In The End, Back She Comes. There's No Use Resisting. She Goes To Him For Amnesia, For Oblivion. She Renders Herself Up, Is Blotted Out; Enters The Darkness Of Her Own Body, Forgets Her Name. Immolation Is What She Wants, However Briefly. To Exist Without Boundaries.

I Became A Poet At The Age Of Sixteen. I Did Not Intend To Do It. It Was Not My Fault.

The Story As Told In The Odyssey Doesn't Hold Water. There Are Too Many Inconsistencies.

Creating Some God For One's Inspirations Was Always A Good Way To Avoid Accusations Of Pride Should The Scheme Succeed, As Well As The Blame If Did Not.

Walking Was Not Fast Enough, So We Ran. Running Was Not Fast Enough, So We Galloped. Galloping Was Not Fast Enough, So We Sailed. Sailing Was Not Fast Enough, So We Rolled Merrily Along On Long Metal Tracks. Long Metal Tracks Were Not Fast Enough, So We Drove. Driving Was Not Fast Enough, So We Flew. Flying Isn't Fast Enough For Us. We Want To Get There Faster. Get Where? Wherever We Are Not. But A Human Soul Can Only Go As Fast As A Man Can Walk, They Used To Say. In That Case, Where Are All The Souls? Left Behind.

Her Glass Wings Are Gone.

We Shouldn't Be Saying 'save The Planet'; We Should Be Saying: 'save Viable Conditions In Which People Can Live.' That's What We're Dealing With Here.

You Think You Have The Amount Of Money That Is Your Credit Limit. We're Just Wired To Think That, You Know? Until The Bill Arrives - A Sobering Moment - You Think You're Richer Than You Are.

All I Can Hope For Is A Reconstruction: The Way Love Feels Is Always Only Approximate.

The Truth, It Seems, Is Not Just What You Find When You Open A Door: It Is Itself A Door, Which The Poet Is Always On The Verge Of Going Through.

No Male Writer Is Likely To Be Asked To Sit On A Panel Addressing Itself To The Special Problems Of A Male Writer.

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

The Fact Is That Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror. What Will I Put On Them? Will It Be Good Enough? Will I Have To Throw It Out?

Modesty Is Invisibility... Never Forget It. To Be Seen - To Be Seen - Is To Be... Penetrated. What You Must Be Girls, Is Impenetrable.

A Fist Is More Than The Sum Of Its Fingers.

Mathematical Logic

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.

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 Have Been Evasive About It, At The Time.

I Wish You Good Writing And Good Luck. Even If You've Already Done The Good Writing, You'll Still Need The Good Luck. It's A Shark-filled Lagoon Out There. Cross Your Fingers And Watch Your Back.

Love Is Giving, Marriage Is Buying And Selling. You Can't Put Love Into A Contract.

I Grew Up In The North Woods Of Canada. You Had To Know Certain Things About Survival. Wilderness Survival Courses Weren't Very Formalized When I Was Growing Up, But I Was Taught Certain Things About What To Do If I Got Lost In The Woods.

Why Aren't We Investing More In Alternate Tech? The Saudi Arabians Are, Scottish Power Is. I Was Just There. Could It Be That We're Counting On The Oil Going On Forever And Ever And Ever And Us Having All Of It And Getting Very Rich?

I Planned My Death Carefully, Unlike My Life, Which Meandered Along From One Thing To Another, Despite My Feeble Attempts To Control It.

Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down. I Repeat This To Myself But It Conveys Nothing. You Might As Well Say, Don't Let There Be Air; Or Don't Be. I Suppose You Could Say That.

I Was Delighted With The Film [payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth]; It Almost Made Me Want To Be A Film-maker!

Human Understanding Is Fallible, And We See Through A Glass, Darkly. Any Religion Is A Shadow Of God. But The Shadows Of God Are Not God.

Our Generation In The West Was Lucky: We Had Readymade Gateways. We Had Books, Paper, Teachers, Schools And Libraries. But Many In The World Lack These Luxuries. How Do You Practice Without Such Tryout Venues?

What A Moron I Was To Think You Were Sweet And Innocent, When It Turns Out You Were Actually College-educated The Whole Time!

Writers And Books Are Cheap Dates, Especially When You Compare The Cost Of A Book With A Ticket To The Opera - Or An Nhl Game.

I Was Unfair To Him, Of Course, But Where Would I Have Been Without Unfairness? In Thrall, In Harness. Young Women Need Unfairness, It's One Of Their Few Defenses. They Need Their Callousness, They Need Their Ignorance. They Walk In The Dark, Along The Edges Of High Cliffs, Humming To Themselves, Thinking Themselves Invulnerable.

Never Mind. Point Being That You Don't Have To Get Too Worked Up About Us, Dear Educated Minds. You Don't Have To Think Of Us Aas Real Girls, Real Flesh And Blood, Real Pain, Real Injustice. That Might Be Too Upsetting. Just Discard The Sordid Part. Consider Us Pure Symbol. We're No More Real Than Money.

Everyone Thinks Writers Must Know More About The Inside Of The Human Head, But That's Wrong. They Know Less, That's Why They Write. Trying To Find Out What Everyone Else Takes For Granted.

I Don't Want To Look At Something That Determines Me So Completely.

I Suppose It's Everyone's Fate To Be Reduced To Quaintness By Those Younger Than Themselves.

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