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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.

-Margaret Atwood

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Once In A While,

Margaret Atwood

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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.

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Like Many Modern Poets, I Tend To Conceal Rhymes By Placing Them In The Middle Of Lines, And To Avoid Immediate Alliteration And Assonance In Favor Of Echoes Placed Later In The Poems.

The Answers You Get From Literature Depend On The Questions You Pose.

About No Subject Are Poets Tempted To Lie So Much As About Their Own Lives.

I Got Into Trouble A While Ago For Saying That I Thought The Internet Led To Increased Literacy - People Scolded Me About The Shocking Grammar To Be Found Online - But I Was Talking About Fundamentals: Quite Simply, You Can't Use The Net Unless You Can Read.

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

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

But I Keep Going On With This Sad And Hungry And Sordid, This Limping And Mutilated Story, Because After All I Want You To Hear It, As I Will Hear Yours Too If I Ever Get The Chance, If I Meet You Or If You Escape, In The Future Or In Heaven Or In Prison Or Underground, Some Other Place. What They Have In Common Is That They're Not Here. By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, I Believe You're There, I Believe You Into Being. Because I'm Telling You This Story I Will Your Existence. I Tell, Therefore You Are.

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?

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.

Marshall Mcluhan Is Absolutely Right, We Are Always Looking In The Rear View Mirror.

I Am Rather Saddened At The End Of A Book. I Think Most Writers Find This. It's Like A Friend Departing On A Voyage.

It Doesn't Really Matter What "genre" Your Book Is. What Matters Is That It's A Good Book Of Its Kind. Whatever That Kind May Be.

You Refuse To Own Yourself, You Permit Others To Do It For You

While In A Vintage Restaurant..."the Past Isn't Quaint While You're In It. Only At A Safe Distance, Later, When You See It As Decor, Not As The Shape Your Life's Been Squeezed Into.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Nobody Quite Knows The Truth About Cats Purring, But It Does Seem To Be Also A Self-healing Thing For Them, Which Is Why, When You Take Your Cat To The Vet And It's Frightened, It Will Purr.

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

When I Finally Went To School I Had To Adjust To Other Girls And Learn Their Fiendish Ways. Having Learnt Them, I Turned Them On All And Sundry.

For An Instant She Felt Them, Their Identities, Almost Their Substance, Pass Over Her Head Like A Wave. At Some Time She Would Be — Or No, Already She Was Like That Too; She Was One Of Them, Her Body The Same, Identical, Merged With That Other Flesh That Choked The Air In The Flowered Room With Its Sweet Organic Scent; She Felt Suffocated By This Thick Sargasso-sea Of Femininity.

Even In The Tragedies, Shakespeare Always Put In Parts For The Comic Actors Because His Audience Was Mixed. He Puts In People Who Talk Like Aristocrats. He Puts In Idiots And Fools. He Puts In Certain Middle-range Characters. And When You Go To The Globe, You Realize How That All Works. The People Who Paid More Sat In Seats Around The Edge. Everybody Else Paid A Penny. They Put It Into A Tin Box - That's Why We Call It The "box Office." They Stood In The Pit, But They Were Very Close, So When Hamlet Was Doing His Soliloquy, It Was Addressed To You, The Audience - Right There.

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

A Suicide Is Both A Rebuke To The Living And A Puzzle That Defies Them To Solve It. Like A Poem, Suicide Is Finished And Refuses To Answer Questions As To Its Final Cause.

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

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.

People Use Technology Only To Mean Digital Technology. Technology Is Actually Everything We Make.

Oil Paints...the Look Of Licked Lips.

Old Lovers Go The Way Of Old Photographs, Bleaching Out Gradually As In A Slow Bath Of Acid: First The Moles And Pimples, Then The Shadings. Then The Faces Themselves, Until Nothing Remains But The General Outlines.

I'm From The Generation That Had The Boys' Door And The Girls' Door When You Went To School, And You Got In Big Trouble If You Went In The Wrong One.

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

You Can Wipe Your Feet On Me, Twist My Motives Around All You Like, You Can Dump Millstones On My Head And Drown Me In The River, But You Can’t Get Me Out Of The Story. I’m The Plot, Babe, And Don’t Ever Forget It.

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.

I Am Not Your Justification For Existence.

The Past Is A Closed Door.

An Eye For An Eye Only Leads To More Blindness.

Hunger Is A Powerful Reorganizer Of The Conscience.

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?

Publishers Are In Business To Make Money, And If Your Books Do Well They Don't Care If You Are Male, Female, Or An Elephant.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Future Of Narrative? Built In, Part Of The Human Template. Not Going Away. The Future Of The Codex Book, With Pages And So Forth? A Platform For Transmitting Narratives. There Are Others. The Scroll Is Coming Back (twitter Is A Scroll.) Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling. Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

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

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

While He Writes, I Feel As If He Is Drawing Me; Or Not Drawing Me, Drawing On Me - Drawing On My Skin - Not With The Pencil He Is Using, But With An Old-fashioned Goose Pen, And Not With The Quill End But With The Feather End. As If Hundreds Of Butterflies Have Settled All Over My Face, And Are Softly Opening And Closing Their Wings.

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.

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.

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

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

There Is Something Powerful In The Whispering Of Obscenities, About Those In Power. There's Something Delightful About It, Something Naughty, Secretive, Forbidden, Thrilling. It's Like A Spell, Of Sorts. It Deflates Them, Reduces Them To The Common Denominator Where They Can Be Dealt.

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.

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

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Everything.

Because You Are Never Here But Always There, I Forget Not You But What You Look Like You Drift Down The Street In The Rain, Your Face Dissolving, Changing Shape, The Colours Running Together My Walls Absorb You, Breathe You Forth Again, You Resume Yourself, I Do Not Recognize You You Rest On The Bed Watching Me Watching You, We Will Never Know Each Other Any Better Than We Do Now

I Always Thought Eating Was A Ridiculous Activity Anyway. I'd Get Out Of It Myself If I Could, Though You've Got To Do It To Stay Alive, They Tell Me.

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

So This Was The Rest Of His Life. It Felt Like A Party To Which He'd Been Invited, But At An Address He Couldn't Actually Locate. Someone Must Be Having Fun At It, This Life Of His; Only, Right At The Moment, It Wasn't Him.

Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

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.

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

If I Am Good Enough And Quiet Enough, Perhaps After All They Will Let Me Go; But It’s Not Easy Being Quiet And Good, It’s Like Hanging On To The Edge Of A Bridge When You’ve Already Fallen Over; You Don’t Seem To Be Moving, Just Dangling There, And Yet It Is Taking All Your Strength.

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.

For Years I Wanted To Be Older, And Now I Am.

Our Biggest Moral Debt Is To The Environment. Take-take-take, Nothing Given Back.

I’m Not Sure Which Is Worse: Intense Feeling, Or The Absence Of It.

I Grew Up Amongst Biologists.

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.

The Temptation Is To Stay Inside; To Subside Into The Kind Of Recluse Whom Neighborhood Children Regard With Derision And Little Awe; To Let The Hedges And Weeds Grow Up, To Allow The Doors To Rust Shut, To Lie On My Bed In Some Gown-shaped Garment And Let My Hair Lengthens And Spread Out Over The Pillow And My Fingernails To Sprout Into Claws, While Candle Wax Drips Onto The Carpet. But Long Ago I Made A Choice Between Classicism And Romanticism. I Prefer To Be Upright And Contained—an Urn In Daylight.

Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down.

Poetry Is Where The Language Is Renewed.

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.

We Thought We Were Running Away From The Grownups, And Now We Are The Grownups.

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?

Extinctathon, Monitored By Maddaddam. Adam Named The Living Animals, Maddaddam Names The Dead Ones. Do You Want To Play?

Roughing It Builds A Boy's Character, But Only Certain Kinds Of Roughing It.

In My Dreams Of This City I Am Always Lost.

Younger People Have Greatest Fears. Why Is That? Because They Don't Know The Plot. They Don't Know Their Own Individual Plot... They Don't Know What's Going To Happen To Them.

Knowing Was A Temptation. What You Don't Know Won't Tempt You.

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 True Story Is Vicious And Multiple And Untrue After All. Why Do You Need It? Don’t Ever Ask For The True Story.

Anybody Who Writes A Book Is An Optimist. First Of All, They Think They're Going To Finish It. Second, They Think Somebody's Going To Publish It. Third, They Think Somebody's Going To Read It. Fourth, They Think Somebody's Going To Like It. How Optimistic Is That?

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

The Society In 'the Handmaid's Tale' Is A Throwback To The Early Puritans Whom I Studied Extensively At Harvard Under Perry Miller, To Whom The Book Is Dedicated.

The Scroll Is Coming Back (twitter Is A Scroll.)

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.

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

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.

Men Are Not To Be Told Anything They Might Find Too Painful; The Secret Depths Of Human Nature, The Sordid Physicalities, Might Overwhelm Or Damage Them. For Instance, Men Often Faint At The Sight Of Their Own Blood, To Which They Are Not Accustomed. For This Reason You Should Never Stand Behind One In The Line At The Red Cross Donor Clinic.

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

There Is No Fool Like An Educated Fool.

So That’s What Art Is, For The Artist,” Said Crake. “an Empty Drainpipe. An Amplifier. A Stab At Getting Laid.

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.

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

Time Is Not A Thing That Passes ... It's A Sea On Which You Float.

I Don't Want To See Anyone. I Lie In The Bedroom With The Curtains Drawn And Nothingness Washing Over Me Like A Sluggish Wave. Whatever Is Happening To Me Is My Own Fault. I Have Done Something Wrong, Something So Huge I Can't Even See It, Something That's Drowning Me. I Am Inadequate And Stupid, Without Worth. I Might As Well Be Dead.

The Internet Is 95 Percent Porn And Spam

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.

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

What Else Can I Do? Once You've Gone This Far You Aren't Fit For Anything Else. Something Happens To Your Mind. You're Overqualified, Overspecialized, And Everybody Knows It. Nobody In Any Other Game Would Be Crazy Enough To Hire Me. I Wouldn't Even Make A Good Ditch-digger, I'd Start Tearing Apart The Sewer-system, Trying To Pick-axe And Unearth All Those Chthonic Symbols - Pipes, Valves, Cloacal Conduits... No, No. I'll Have To Be A Slave In The Paper-mines For All Time.

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.

I Know That Some Books And Some Writers, You Can Pretty Much Draw A Square Around It And Say, 'nobody Under 40,' Or 'nobody Under 25.' With My Books, It Always Has Been, And Continues To Be, Spread Right Across The Board, And I Think The Operative Term Is 'reader.'

As Charles Darwin Said,'the Economy Shown By Nature In Her Resources Is Striking,'' Says The Spirit. 'all Wealth Comes From Nature. Without It, There Wouldn't Be Any Economics. The Primary Wealth Is Food, Not Money. Therefore Anything That Concerns The Handling Of The Land Also Concerns Me.

Reality Simply Consists Of Different Points Of View.

And Yet It Disturbs Me To Learn I Have Hurt Someone Unintentionally. I Want All My Hurts To Be Intentional.

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

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.

Support Your Libraries... Or Else!

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.

As God Contains All Good Things, He Must Also Contain A Sense Of Playfulness -- A Gift He Has Shared With Creatures Other Than Ourselves, As Witness The Tricks Crows Play, And The Sportiveness Of Squirrels, And The Frolicking Of Kittens.

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

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.

Lose Your Temper And You Lose The Fight.

A Divorce Is Like An Amputation: You Survive It, But There's Less Of You.

He Might Die For Her, But Living For Her Would Be Quite Different.

I'm A Fool, To Confuse This With Goodness. I Am Not Good. I Know Too Much To Be Good. I Know Myself. I Know Myself To Be Vengeful, Greedy, Secretive And Sly.

The Thing About Delirium Is You Think It's Great, But It Actually Isn't.

Knowledge Is Power Only As Long As You Keep Your Mouth Shut.

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?

Storytelling Is A Very Old Human Skill That Gives Us An Evolutionary Advantage. If You Can Tell Young People How You Kill An Emu, Acted Out In Song Or Dance, Or That Uncle George Was Eaten By A Croc Over There, Don't Go There To Swim, Then Those Young People Don't Have To Find Out By Trial And Error.

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

We Have Been Shark To One Another, But Also Lifeboat.

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

Without A Trace

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.

Paper Isn’t Important. It’s The Words On Them That Are Important.

I Grew Up In The Golden Age Of Flash Gordon And Sci-fi.

The Heart With Letters On It Shining Like A Light Bulb Through The Trim Hole Painted In The Chest, Art History.

Some Of The Old Diseases That We Think Are Gone - Case In Point, Measles - Are Back, Now That Somebody Has Spread Around, In A Very Wicked Way, The Idea That These Inoculations Were Making Children Autistic. Now We're Getting Outbreaks That Are Killing Children. The End Result Is, If You Create A Population That Lacks Immunity, And Diseases Are Still There, You're Going To Get Outbreaks And You're Going To Get Death.

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.

Gardening Is Not A Rational Act.

Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror.

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.

We Are A Society Dying, Said Aunt Lydia, Of Too Much Choice.

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.

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

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

I Am Not My Childhood,' Snowman Says Out Loud.

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.

Why Can't I Believe? She Asked The Darkness. Behind Her Eyelids She Saw An Animal. It Was Golden Colour, With Gentle Green Eyes And Canine Teeth, And Curly Wool Instead Of Fur. It Opened Its Mouth, But It Did Not Speak. Instead, It Yawned.it Gazed At Her. She Gazed At It. "you Are The Effect Of A Carefully Calibrated Blend Of Plant Toxins," She Told It.then She Fell Asleep.

The Facts Of This World Seen Clearly Are Seen Through Tears.

Before The Civil War, Canada Was At The Top Of The Underground Railroad. If You Made It Into Canada, You Were Safe Unless Someone Came And Hauled You Back. That Was Also True During The Vietnam War For Draft Resisters.

Cleverness Is A Quality A Man Likes To Have In His Wife As Long As She Is Some Distance Away From Him. Up Close, He'll Take Kindness Any Day Of The Week, If There's Nothing More Alluring To Be Had.

You Fit Into Me Like A Hook Into An Eye A Fish Hook An Open Eye

I Hate To Break This To You: One Of These Days I'm Going To Die. I Expect That When I Croak I'll No Longer Be Using Twitter, Unless I Can Do It From The Grave.

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

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.

A Handful Of Crumpled Stars

Karen Wasn't Hard, She Was Soft, Too Soft. A Soft Touch. Her Hair Was Soft, Her Smile Was Soft, Her Voice Was Soft. She Was So Soft There Was No Resistance. Hard Things Sank Into Her, They Went Right Through Her, And If She Made A Real Effort, Out The Other Side. Then She Didn't Have To See Them Or Hear Them, Or Even Touch Them.

Time Rises And Rises, And When It Reaches The Level Of Your Eyes You Drown.

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

My Father Was A Forest Entomologist, Which Means He Was Aware That Spraying Forests For Spruce Budworm Was Counterproductive In That It Didn't Really Work, And It Killed Everything Else In The Forests, And It Wasn't Good For The People Who Were Exposed To It, Either. So He Was An Early Proponent Of Not Doing That, But, Of Course, Nobody Listened.

I Tell, Therefore You Are.

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.

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.

She Imagines Him Imagining Her. This Is Her Salvation. In Spirit She Walks The City, Traces Its Labyrinths, Its Dingy Mazes: Each Assignation, Each Rendezvous, Each Door And Stair And Bed. What He Said, What She Said, What They Did, What They Did Then. Even The Times They Argued, Fought, Parted, Agonized, Rejoined. How They’d Loved To Cut Themselves On Each Other, Taste Their Own Blood. We Were Ruinous Together, She Thinks. But How Else Can We Live, These Days, Except In The Midst Of Ruin?

Well. Then We Had The Irises, Rising Beautiful And Cool On Their Tall Stalks, Like Blown Glass, Like Pastel Water Momentarily Frozen In A Splash, Light Blue, Light Mauve, And The Darker Ones, Velvet And Purple, Black Cat's Ears In The Sun, Indigo Shadow, And The Bleeding Hearts, So Female In Shape It Was A Surprise They'd Not Long Since Been Rooted Out. There Is Something Subversive About This Garden Of Serena's, A Sense Of Buried Things Bursting Upwards, Wordlessly, Into The Light, As If To Point, To Say: Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamor To Be Heard, Though Silently.

When I Was Young I Believed That "nonfiction" Meant "true." But You Read A History Written In, Say, 1920 And A History Of The Same Events Written In 1995 And They're Very Different. There May Not Be One Truth - There May Be Several Truths - But Saying That Is Not To Say That Reality Doesn't Exist.

I Myself Have 12 Hats And Each One Represents A Different Personality. Why Just Be Yourself.

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.

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.

Don't Wait Until You're 'in The Mood.' Get Into The Mood By Writing.

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.

But People Will Do Anything Rather Than Admit That Their Lives Have No Meaning. No Use, That Is. No Plot.

A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power.

I'm Not An Activist By Nature. I Am Suspicious Of Utopian Thinking And Equally Suspicious Of Its Alternate.

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

Repeat Reading For Me Shares A Few Things With Hot-water Bottles And Thumbsucking: Comfort, Familiarity, The Recurrence Of The Expected.

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.

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

Craziness Was Considered Funny, Like All Other Things That Were In Reality Frightening And Profoundly Shameful.

Your Hand Is A Warm Stone I Hold Between Two Words.

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

Her Glass Wings Are Gone.

Good Writing Takes Place At Intersections, At What You Might Call Knots, At Places Where The Society Is Snarled Or Knotted Up.

In Heaven, There Are No Debts - All Have Been Paid, One Way Or Another - But In Hell There's Nothing But Debts, And A Great Deal Of Payment Is Exacted, Though You Can't Ever Get All Paid Up. You Have To Pay, And Pay, And Keep On Paying. So Hell Is Like An Infernal Maxed-out Credit Card That Multiplies The Charges Endlessly.

It's True That There Is A Rescue Thing In People, And Not Just Rescuing The Family, Which Is Kind Of Obvious From A Biological Point Of View. But Why Is It That Some People Will Jump Into A Freezing River And Swim Out To A Downed Plane For Total Strangers? What Is That About? And It Seems To Be That It's Part Of Your Concept Of Who You Are. That's Why Some People Run Into The Burning Buildings, Because If They Don't, Their Concept Of Who They Are Will Be Violated. They Wouldn't Be Who They Thought They Were.

She Had Her Reasons. Not That They Were The Same As Anybody Else's Reasons.

The Use Of "religion" As An Excuse To Repress The Freedom Of Expression And To Deny Human Rights Is Not Confined To Any Country Or Time.

The Best Way Of Keeping A Secret Is To Pretend There Isn't One.

Keeping Secrets

Love Blurs Your Vision; But After It Recedes, You Can See More Clearly Than Ever. It's Like The Tide Going Out, Revealing Whatever's Been Thrown Away And Sunk: Broken Bottles, Old Gloves, Rusting Pop Cans, Nibbled Fishbodies, Bones. This Is The Kind Of Thing You See If You Sit In The Darkness With Open Eyes, Not Knowing The Future.

You Most Likely Need A Thesaurus, A Rudimentary Grammar Book, And A Grip On Reality. This Latter Means: There's No Free Lunch. 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.

Toast Is Me. I Am Toast.

I Enjoyed Teaching. I Liked The Students. Having To Formulate My Ideas About Literature Made Them Clearer. I Did Not Particularly Enjoy The More Bureaucratic Aspects Of The Job. However, If You Are Teaching Fervently, Your Energy And Time Are Used Up At A Great Rate.

I Did ... Learn An Important Distinction In Graduate School: A Speculation About Who Had Syphilis When Is Gossip If It's About Your Friends, A Plot Element If It's About A Character In A Novel, And Scholarship If It's About John Keats.

Touch Comes Before Sight, Before Speech. It Is The First Language And The Last, And It Always Tells The Truth.

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

If All Fossil Fuel Were To Go Poof! Tomorrow, The Result Would Be A Cataclysmic Social Upheaval, With Food Riots, Warlords, Shutdowns, Breakdown Of Social Order, Water Shortages, And Outbreaks Of Bloodshed And Disease.

Their Mothers Had Finally Caught Up To Them And Been Proven Right. There Were Consequences After All But They Were The Consequences To Things You Didn't Even Know You'd Done.

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?

Happy As A Clam, Is What My Mother Says For Happy. I Am Happy As A Clam: Hard-shelled, Firmly Closed.

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

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Bruno Bettelheim

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