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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.

-Margaret Atwood

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Children Were Vehicles For

Margaret Atwood

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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.

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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.

'1984' Is Not A Wonder Tale. Not Only Could It Happen, But It Has Happened, But Under Different Names.

I've Never Bought Into Any Sort Of Hard And Fast, This-box/that-box Characterization. People Are Individuals. Yes, They May Be Expected To Be A Particular Way. But That Doesn't Mean They're Going To Be That Way.

History, As I Recall, Was Never This Winsome, And Especially Not This Clean, But The Real Thing Would Never Sell: Most People Prefer A Past In Which Nothing Smells.

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.

As I Was Whizzing Around The United States On Yet Another Demented Book Tour, Getting Up At Four In The Morning To Catch Planes, Doing Two Cities A Day, Eating The Pringle Food Object Out Of The Mini-bar At Night As I Crawled Around On The Hotel Room Floor, Too Tired Even To Phone Room Service, I Thought, 'there Must Be A Better Way Of Doing This'.

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.

It's Impossible To Say A Thing Exactly The Way It Was, Because Of What You Say Can Never Be Exact, You Always Have To Leave Something Out, There Are Too Many Parts, Sides, Crosscurrents, Nuances; Too Many Gestures, Which Could Mean This Or That, Too Many Shapes Which Can Never Be Fully Described, Too Many Flavors, In The Air Or On The Tongue, Half-colors, Too Many.

Snowman Wakes Before Dawn.

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.

This Afternoon Held That Special Quality Of Mournful Emptiness I've Connected With Late Sunday Afternoons Ever Since Childhood: The Feeling Of Having Nothing To Do.

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

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.

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.

A Fist Is More Than The Sum Of Its Fingers.

Mathematical Logic

Where There's A Doctor It's Always A Bad Sign. Even When They Are Not Doing The Killing Themselves It Means A Death Is Close, And In That Way They Are Like Ravens Or Crows.

The Interesting Thing About The Religious Component, For Me, Is That Jesus Hardly Mentions Sex At All. He's Pretty Interested In The Poor, He's Pretty Interested In Selling Your Worldly Goods And Storing Up Riches In Heaven. However, Religious Fundamentalists Have Made It All About Sex, And That's Like Saying, "look At The Sex And We're Just Not Going To Talk About What You May Be Doing In A Financial Way That Is Sinful."

Write Down The Thoughts And Even More, Write Down A Specific Line. If You Don't, It'll Fly Away Forever.

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

I Particularly Like Twitter, Because It's Short And Can Be Very Funny And Informative. It's A Little Bit Like Having Your Own Radio Program.

People Talking About Politics Usually Start From The Ass End Backwards In That They Think You Have A Political Agenda, And Then You Make Your Work Fit That Cookie Cutter. It's The Other Way Around. One Works By Simple Observation, Looking Into Things. It's Usually Called Insight And Out Of That Comes Your View - Not That You Have The View First And Then Squash Everything To Make It Fit. I'm Not Interested In Cutting The Feet Off My Characters Or Stretching Them To Make Them Fit My Certain Political View.

If A Stranger Taps You On The Ass And Says, "how's The Little Lady Today!" You Will Probably Cringe. But If He's An American, He's Only Being Friendly.

Maybe Sadness Was A Kind Of Hunger, She Thought. Maybe The Two Went Together.

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.

Every Novel Is-at The Beginning-the Same Opening Of A Door Onto A Completely Unknown Space.

I'm A Strict, Strict Agnostic. It's Very Different From A Casual, 'i Don't Know.' It's That You Cannot Present As Knowledge Something That Is Not Knowledge. You Can Present It As Faith, You Can Present It As Belief, But You Can't Present It As Fact.

I Was Warped Early By Ray Bradbury And Edgar Allan Poe. I Was Very Fond Of Franz Kafka.

We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

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.

It Was Very Interesting To Me That When Louisiana Was Destroyed In That Flood The Fundamentalists Were Very Quick To Say, It's The Punishment Of God On A Sinful City. Now That The Oil Industry Has Been So Hard Hit In Galveston, Are They Up On Their Pulpits Saying, God Is Punishing The Oil Industry? No, No, No!

If I Love You, Is That A Fact Or A Weapon?

A Prison Does Not Only Lock Its Inmates Inside, It Keeps All Others Out. Her Strongest Prison Is Of Her Own Construction.

Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.

Love's Never A Fair Trade.

I Marvel Again At The Nakedness Of Men's Lives: The Showers Right Out In The Open, The Body Exposed For Inspection And Comparison, The Public Display Of Privates. What Is It For? What Purposes Of Reassurance Does It Serve? The Flashing Of A Badge, Look, Everyone, All Is In Order, I Belong Here. Why Don't Women Have To Prove To One Another That They Are Women? Some Form Of Unbuttoning, Some Split-crotch Routine, Just As Casual. A Doglike Sniffing.

In His Student Days, He Used To Argue That If A Woman Has No Other Course Open To Her But Starvation, Prostitution, Or Throwing Herself From A Bridge, Then Surely The Prostitute, Who Has Shown The Most Tenacious Instinct For Self-preservation, Should Be Considered Stronger And Saner Than Her Frailer And No Longer Living Sisters. One Couldn't Have It Both Ways, He'd Pointed Out: If Women Are Seduced And Abandoned They're Supposed To Go Mad, But If They Survive, And Seduce In Their Turn, Then They Were Mad To Begin With.

The Alcohol Smell Is On My Fingers, Cold And Remote, Piercing Like A Steel Pin Going In. It Smells Like White Enamel Basins. When I Look Up At The Stars In The Nighttime, Cold And White And Sharp, I Think They Must Smell Like That.

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 Did Not Know That 'poetess' Was An Insult, And That I Myself Would Some Day Be Called One. I Did Not Know That To Be Told I Had Transcended My Gender Would Be Considered A Compliment. I Didn't Know — Yet — That Black Was Compulsory. All Of That Was In The Future. When I Was Sixteen, It Was Simple. Poetry Existed; Therefore It Could Be Written; And Nobody Had Told Me — Yet — The Many, Many Reasons Why It Could Not Be Written By Me.

Glenn Used To Say The Reason You Can't Really Imagine Yourself Being Dead Was That As Soon As You Say, 'i'll Be Dead,' You've Said The Word I, And So You're Still Alive Inside The Sentence. And That's How People Got The Idea Of The Immortality Of The Soul - It Was A Consequence Of Grammar.

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.

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.

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

Toast Was A Pointless Invention From The Dark Ages. Toast Was An Implement Of Torture That Caused All Those Subjected To It To Regurgitate In Verbal Form The Sins And Crimes Of Their Past Lives. Toast Was A Ritual Item Devoured By Fetishists In The Belief That It Would Enhance Their Kinetic And Sexual Powers. Toast Cannot Be Explained By Any Rational Means. Toast Is Me. I Am Toast.

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 Knew What Love Was Supposed To Be: Obsession With Undertones Of Nausea.

It's Evening, One Of Those Gray Water-color Washes, Like Liquid Dust.

There's Something To Be Said For Hunger: At Least It Lets You Know You're Still Alive.

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

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?

Canadians And Americans May Look Alike, But The Contents Of Their Heads Are Quite Different. Americans Experience Themselves, Individually, As Small Toads In The Biggest And Most Powerful Puddle In The World. Their Sense Of Power Comes From Identifying With The Puddle. Canadians As Individuals May Have More Power Within The Puddle, Since There Are Fewer Toads In It; It's The Puddle That's Seen As Powerless.

The Desire To Be Loved Is The Last Illusion. Give It Up And You Will Be Free.

I Never Say I'm An "ist" Of Any Kind Unless I Know How The Other Person Is Defining It.

After Everything That's Happened, How Can The World Still Be So Beautiful? Because It Is.

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.

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

She Wasn't Ready To Settle Down, She Told Her Friends. That Was One Way Of Putting It. Another Was Would Have Been That She Had Not Found Anyone To Settle Down With. There Had Been Several Men In Her Life, But They Hadn't Been Convincing. They'd Been Somewhat Like Her Table - Quickly Acquired, Brightened Up A Little, But Temporary. The Time For That Kind Of Thing Was Running Out, However. She Was Tired Of Renting.

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

All Fiction Is About People, Unless It's About Rabbits Pretending To Be People. It's All Essentially Characters In Action, Which Means Characters Moving Through Time And Changes Taking Place, And That's What We Call 'the Plot'.

It's His Word Against The Commander's, Unless He Wants To Head A Posse. Kick In The Door, And What Did I Tell You? Caught In The Act, Sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, Eat Those Words.

Love Is The Pursuit Of Shadows.

I Have Periods Now, Like Normal Girls; I Too Am Among The Knowing, I Too Can Sit Out Volleyball Games And Go To The Nurse's For Aspirin And Waddle Along The Halls With A Pad Like A Flattened Rabbit Tail Wadded Between My Legs, Sopping With Liver-colored Blood.

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

I Think Calling It Climate Change Is Rather Limiting. I Would Rather Call It The Everything Change.

I Used To Think Of My Body As An Instrument, Of Pleasure, Or A Means Of Transportation, Or An Implement For The Accomplishment Of My Will.

You Always Think, 'oh, If Only I Had A Little Chalet In The Mountains! How Great That Would Be And I'd Do All This Writing' Except, No, I Wouldn't. I'd Do The Same Amount Of Writing I Do Now And The Rest Of The Time I'd Go Stir Crazy. If You're Waiting For The Perfect Moment You'll Never Write A Thing Because It Will Never Arrive. I Have No Routine. I Have No Foolproof Anything. There's Nothing Foolproof.

Why Do Men Feel Threatened By Women?

It's Very Hard For Students Not To Be In Debt Unless They've Got Big Scholarships Or Rich Parents. And It's Called Investing In Your Future, But Like Any Investment It's Risky Because Your Future Is An Unknown Quantity. However, If You Don't Invest In Your Future, You May Be Flipping Hamburgers For The Rest Of Your Life. So It's A Real Dilemma.

I Could End This With A Moral, As If This Were A Fable About Animals, Though No Fables Are Really About Animals.

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.

I Didn't Go To School For A Full Year Until I Was 12. In The Summer I Was A Wild Child In The Woods, With No Shoes, And In The Fall It Was Back To The City, Shoe Shops And School.

There Are Some Virtues To Not Saying What You Think All The Time.

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

The Fabric Of Democracy Is Always Fragile Everywhere Because It Depends On The Will Of Citizens To Protect It, And When They Become Scared, When It Becomes Dangerous For Them To Defend It, It Can Go Very Quickly.

I Am Afraid Of Falling Into Hopeless Despair, Over My Wasted Life, And I Am Still Not Sure How It Happened.

Books Are Frozen Voices, In The Same Way That Musical Scores Are Frozen Music. The Score Is A Way Of Transmitting The Music To Someone Who Can Play It, Releasing It Into The Air Where It Can Once More Be Heard. And The Black Alphabet Marks On The Page Represent Words That Were Once Spoken, If Only In The Writer's Head. They Lie There Inert Until A Reader Comes Along And Transforms The Letters Into Living Sounds. The Reader Is The Musician Of The Book: Each Reader May Read The Same Text, Just As Each Violinist Plays The Same Piece, But Each Interpretation Is Different.

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

If We Were All On Trial For Our Thoughts, We Would All Be Hanged.

I Thought Everyone Would Be Familiar With This Figure: If I'd Studied A Thing In School I Assumed It Was General Knowledge. I Hadn't Yet Discovered That I Lived In A Sort Of Transparent Balloon, Drifting Over The World Without Making Much Contact With It, And That The People I Knew Appeared To Me At A Different Angle From The One At Which They Appeared To Themselves; And That The Reverse Was Also True. I Was Smaller To Others, Up There In My Balloon, Than I Was To Myself. I Was Also Blurrier.

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.

He Has Been Trying To Sing Love Into Existence Again And He Has Failed

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.

More Powerful Than God, More Evil Than The Devil; The Poor Have It, The Rich Lack It, And If You Eat It You Die?

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.

I Read For Pleasure And That Is The Moment I Learn The Most.

I Could See How You Could Do Extreme Things For The Person You Loved. Adam One Said That When You Loved A Person, That Love Might Not Always Get Returned The Way You Wanted, But It Was A Good Thing Anyway Because Love Went Out All Around You Like An Energy Wave, And A Creature You Didn't Know Would Be Helped By It.

Life's Not Fair; Why Should I Be?

The Threat To The Planet Is Us. It's Actually Not A Threat To The Planet - It's A Threat To Us.

Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling.

My Family Was Scientifically Inclined: My Brother Did Turn Into A Neurophysiologist, And I Almost Became A Scientist Myself. I Could Have Gone That Way.

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.

In The Spring, At The End Of The Day, You Should Smell Like Dirt.

Not Real Can Tell Us About Real.

You're Never Going To Kill Storytelling, Because It's Built Into The Human Plan. We Come With It.

But Most Hearts Say, I Want, I Want, I Want, I Want. My Heart Is More Duplicitous, Though No Twin As I Once Thought. It Says, I Want, I Don't Want, I Want, And Then A Pause. It Forces Me To Listen.

It Had Helped To Keep Her Sane, That Writing. Then, When Time Had Begun Again And Real People Had Entered It, She'd Abandoned It Here. Now It's A Whisper From The Past. Is That What Writing Amounts To? The Voice Your Ghost Would Have, If It Had A Voice?

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

A Voice Is A Human Gift; It Should Be Cherished And Used, To Utter Fully Human Speech As Possible. Powerlessness And Silence Go Together.

A Ratio Of Failures Is Built Into The Process Of Writing. The Wastebasket Has Evolved For A Reason.

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.

Laughter May Instruct But It May Also Conceal, Defending The Joker Against Anger And Retaliation: A Game Is Only A Game.

His Mouth Is On Me, His Hands, I Can't Wait And He's Moving, Already, Love, It's Been So Long, I'm Alive In My Skin, Again, Arms Around Him, Falling And Water Softly Everywhere, Never-ending.

How Could I Be Sleeping With This Particular Man.... Surely Only True Love Could Justify My Lack Of Taste.

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

Here And There Are Worms, Evidence Of The Fertility Of The Soil, Caught By The Sun, Half Dead; Flexible And Pink, Like Lips.

... 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.

The Body Is So Easily Damaged, So Easily Disposed Of, Water And Chemicals Is All It Is, Hardly More To It Than A Jellyfish Drying On Sand.

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.

What Am I Living For And What Am I Dying For Are The Same Question.

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

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.

You're Dead, Cordelia.' No I'm Not. 'yes You Are. You're Dead. Lie Down.

Time In Dreams Is Frozen. You Can Never Get Away From Where You've Been.

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

Without The Light, No Chance; Without The Dark, No Dance.

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.

You Don't Look Back Along Time But Down Through It, Like Water. Sometimes This Comes To The Surface, Sometimes That, Sometimes Nothing. Nothing Goes Away.

I Have Always Known That There Were Spellbinding Evil Parts For Women. For One Thing, I Was Taken At An Early Age To See Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Never Mind The Protestant Work Ethic Of The Dwarfs. Never Mind The Tedious Housework-is-virtuous Motif. Never Mind The Fact That Snow White Is A Vampire -- Anyone Who Lies In A Glass Coffin Without Decaying And Then Comes To Life Again Must Be. The Truth Is That I Was Paralysed By The Scene In Which The Evil Queen Drinks The Magic Potion And Changes Her Shape. What Power, What Untold Possibilities!

Now That I Am Dead, I Know Everything.

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.

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.

If I Pick Up A Book With Vampires On The Cover, I Want There To Be Vampires. If I Pick Up A Book With Spaceships On The Cover, I Want Spaceships. If I See One With Dragons, I Want There To Be Dragons Inside The Book. Proper Labeling. Ethical Labeling.

There Is More Than One Kind Of Freedom," Said Aunt Lydia. "freedom To And Freedom From. In The Days Of Anarchy, It Was Freedom To. Now You Are Being Given Freedom From. Don't Underrate It.

Starlet Sex Scandal. Giant Squid Involved.

And Each Of His Voices Left His Body In A Different Colored Soul And Floated Up Towards The Sun Still Singing.

You Might 'write From The Heart,' But You'd Better Polish With Your Brain.

She Had No Images Of This Love. She Could Offer No Anecdotes. It Was A Belief Rather Than A Memory.

In My Dreams Of This City I Am Always Lost.

It Was Exciting To Work With Director Jennifer Baichwal, Who Made Manufactured Landscapes And Others, On The Film Of Payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth. It's Called, Simply, Payback. Jennifer Didn't Want To Do A Transliteration Of The Book, A Kind Of Illustrated Version, But To Go Into The Core Of The Book: Owing And Being Owed, Paying And Paying Back, On All Sorts Of Levels. So She Found Real-life, Visceral Stories That Embodied The Themes Of The Book.

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

Great Literature

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.

I Want, I Don’t Want. How Can One Live With Such A Heart?

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.

I Have Never Had Any Problems With Editors Who Wanted Me To Change My Methods Or Point Of View. I Pay A Lot Of Attention To Editors, But In A Different Way. They Sometimes Catch Mistakes And Help With The Order Of Poems In A Book. I Do Not Underestimate Them! Indeed, I Have Been One Myself.

Sooner Or Later, I Hate To Break It To You, You're Gonna Die, So How Do You Fill In The Space Between Here And There? It's Yours. Seize Your Space.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Everything.

Forgiving Men Is So Much Easier Than Forgiving Women.

There's Something Final About Saying You Were Married Once. It's Like Saying You Were Dead Once. It Shuts Them Up.

A Man Is Just A Woman's Strategy For Making Other Women.

There Is Something Reassuring About The Toilets. Bodily Functions At Least Remain Democratic. Everybody Shits.

Bodily Functions

I Want To Be Held And Told My Name. I Want To Be Valued, In Ways That I Am Not; I Want To Be More Than Valuable. I Repeat My Former Name; Remind Myself Of What I Once Could Do, How Others Saw Me. I Want To Steal Something.

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.

I Am Not A Saint Or A Cripple, I Am Not A Wound; Now I Will See Whether I Am A Coward.

A Movie About The Past Is Not The Same As The Past.

Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.

In The End, We'll All Become Stories.

Science And Fiction Both Begin With Similar Questions: What If? Why? How Does It All Work? But They Focus On Different Areas Of Life On Earth.

Don't Misunderstand Me. I Am Not Scoffing At Goodness, Which Is Far More Difficult To Explain Than Evil, And Far More Complicated. But Sometimes It's Hard To Put Up With.

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.

How Shrunk, How Dwindled, In Our Times Creation's Mighty Seed - For Man Has Broke The Fellowship With Murder, Lust, And Greed.

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.

Nothing Changes Instantaneously: In A Gradually Heating Bathtub You'd Be Boiled To Death Before You Knew It.

Every Budding Dictatorship Begins By Muzzling The Artists, Because They're A Mouthy Lot And They Don't Line Up And Salute Very Easily.

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.

I Want Everything Back, The Way It Was. But There Is No Point To It, This Wanting.

Though As He'd Say, What Is 'belief' But A Willingness To Suspend The Negatives?

Imagine A Famine. Now Imagine A Piece Of Bread. Both Of These Things Are Real But You Happen To Be In The Same Room With Only One Of Them. Put Yourself Into A Different Room, That’s What The Mind Is For.

When They Came To Harvest My Corpse (open Your Mouth, Close Your Eyes) Cut My Body From The Rope, Surprise, Surprise: I Was Still Alive. Tough Luck, Folks, I Know The Law: You Can't Execute Me Twice For The Same Thing. How Nice. I Fell To The Clover, Breathed It In, And Bared My Teeth At Them In A Filthy Grin. You Can Imagine How That Went Over. Now I Only Need To Look Out At Them Through My Sky-blue Eyes. They See Their Own Ill Will Staring Then In The Forehead And Turn Tail Before, I Was Not A Witch. But Now I Am One.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Some Days I Do Appreciate Things More, Eggs, Flowers, But Then I Decide I'm Only Having An Attack Of Sentimentality, My Brain Going Pastel Technicolor, Like A Beautiful-sunset Greeting Cards They Used To Make So Many Of In California. High-gloss Hearts. The Danger Is Grayout.

Science Is A Tool, And We Invent Tools To Do Things We Want. It's A Question Of How Those Tools Are Used By People.

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 Backwards In Time And Exist In Two Places At Once.

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.

They Seemed To Be Able To Choose. We Seemed To Be Able To Choose, Then. We Were A Society Dying Of Too Much Choice.

If You Really Want To Stay The Same Age You Are Now Forever And Ever, She'd Be Thinking, Try Jumping Off The Roof: Death's A Sure-fire Method For Stopping Time.

There's A Difference Between Describing And Evoking Something. You Can Describe Something And Be Quite Clinical About It. To Evoke It, You Call It Up In The Reader. That's What Writers Do When They're Good.

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.

Communications Technology Changes Possibilities For Communication, But That Doesn't Mean It Changes The Inherited Structure Of The Brain. So You May Think That You're Addicted To Online Reading, But As Soon As It Isn't Available Anymore, Your Brain Will Pretty Immediately Adjust To Other Forms Of Reading. It's A Habit Like All Habits.

This Is The Solstice, The Still Point Of The Sun, Its Cusp And Midnight, The Year's Threshold And Unlocking, Where The Past Lets Go Of And Becomes The Future; The Place Of Caught Breath.

The Genesis Of A Poem For Me Is Usually A Cluster Of Words. The Only Good Metaphor I Can Think Of Is A Scientific One: Dipping A Thread Into A Supersaturated Solution To Induce Crystal Formation. I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.

Within One's Own Family, Money Is Not The Measure Of Things, Unless The Person Is An Absolute Scrooge. Only The Most Extreme Kind Of Monster Would Put A Price On Everything.

They Will Not Let You Have Peace, They Don't Want You To Have Anything They Don't Have Themselves.

This Above All, To Refuse To Be A Victim.

Keep An Eye On The Weather, Which Is Changing Faster Than Predicted, And On The New Diseases Escaping Or Being Made, Even As We Speak. It's A Race Between New Tech And Biosphere Bankruptcy, I'd Say.

I Began Writing At The Age Of 5, But There Was A Dark Period Between The Ages Of 8 And 16 When I Didn't Write. I Started Again At 16. And Have No Idea Why, But It Was Suddenly The Only Thing I Wanted To Do.

I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.

Why Are You So Interested In Amoebas?" "oh, They're Immortal," He Said, "and Sort Of Shapeless And Flexible. Being A Person Is Getting Too Complicated.

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.

When Demons Are Required Someone Will Always Be Found To Supply The Part, And Whether You Step Forward Or Are Pushed Is All The Same In The End.

It Wasn't So Easy Though, Ending The War. A War Is A Huge Fire; The Ashes From It Drift Far, And Settle Slowly.

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.

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

Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.

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.

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

My Good Intentions Are Completely Lethal.

Good Intentions

What’s With Her?” Says The Painter. “she’s Mad Because She’s A Woman,” Jon Says. This Is Something I Haven’t Heard For Years, Not Since High School. Once It Was A Shaming Thing To Say, And Crushing To Have It Said About You, By A Man. It Implied Oddness, Deformity, Sexual Malfunction. I Go To The Living Room Doorway. “i’m Not Mad Because I’m A Woman,” I Say. “i’m Mad Because You’re An Asshole.

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

It Isn't Running Away They're Afraid Of. We Wouldn't Get Far. It's Those Other Escapes, The Ones You Can Open In Yourself, Given A Cutting Edge.

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.

Some People Mistakenly Think Nature Is Very Nice And Benevolent And Never Betrays.

Once A Month I Wake In The Night, Slippery With Terror. I'm Afraid, Not Because There's Someone In The Room, In The Dark, In The Bed, But Because There Isn't. I'm Afraid Of The Emptiness, Which Lies Beside Me Like A Corpse.

My Favorite Author's Question Of All Time - Because It's So Simple To Answer ... 'is Your Hair Really Like That, Or Do You Get It Done?

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

I Would Like To Be The Air That Inhabits You For A Moment Only. I Would Like To Be That Unnoticed And That Necessary.

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

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