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Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress. Water Is Not A Solid Wall, It Will Not Stop You. But Water Always Goes Where It Wants To Go, And Nothing In The End Can Stand Against It. Water Is Patient. Dripping Water Wears Away A Stone. Remember That, My Child. Remember You Are Half Water. If You Can't Go Through An Obstacle, Go Around It. Water Does.

-Margaret Atwood

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Water Does Not Resist.

Margaret Atwood

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Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress. Water Is Not A Solid Wall, It Will Not Stop You. But Water Always Goes Where It Wants To Go, And Nothing In The End Can Stand Against It. Water Is Patient. Dripping Water Wears Away A Stone. Remember That, My Child. Remember You Are Half Water. If You Can't Go Through An Obstacle, Go Around It. Water Does.

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

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Good Intentions

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Falling In Love

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Keeping Secrets

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

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

A Truth Should Exist, It Should Not Be Used Like This. If I Love You Is That A Fact Or A Weapon?

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It Was Like Being In An Elevator Cut Loose At The Top. Falling, Falling, And Not Knowing When You Will Hit.

An Eye For An Eye Only Leads To More Blindness.

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.

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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.

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.

A Reader Can Never Tell If It's A Real Thimble Or An Imaginary Thimble, Because By The Time You're Reading It, They're The Same. It's A Thimble. It's In The Book.

Jimmy Found Himself Wishing To Make A Dent In Crake, Get A Reaction; It Was One Of His Weaknesses, To Care What Other People Thought Of Him.

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

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. There Are All Kinds Of Other Things That We Are Not Supposed To Sell - Political Influence Being One Of Them. We Too Rarely Have Public Conversations About The Common Sense Of Money. We Too Rarely Talk About The Human Cost Of Putting Some Of These Economic Measures Into Effect.

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.

He Considers Me Also A Little Fragile Because Artistic. I Need To Be Cared For, Like A Potted Plant.

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

Beginnings Are Sudden, But Also Insidious. They Creep Up On You Sideways, They Keep To The Shadows, They Lurk Unrecognized. Then, Later, They Spring.

I Used To Act In College, But Always Comedy. Didn't Do [william] Shakespeare - Did Ben Jonson.

Writing Of The Narrative Kind, And Perhaps All Writing, Is Motivated Deep Down, By A Fear Or And Fascination With Mortality - By A Desire To Make The Risky Trip To The Underworld And To Bring Something Or Someone Back From The Dead.

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.

It's Rather Useless To Write A Gripping Narrative With Nothing In It But Climate Change Because Novels Are Always About People Even If They Purport To Be About Rabbits Or Robots.

More Of Your Brain Is Involved When Reading Than It Is When You Watch Television... Because You Are Supplying Just About Everything... You're A Creator.

I'm Not Senile," I Snapped. "if I Burn The House Down It Will Be On Purpose.

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.

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

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

I Have Been Known To Buy E-versions Of My Books Because I Was In A Hotel Room And I Needed One Right Away To Look Up Something In It; Very Handy For That - You Can Have It Just The Next Minute; You Can Press The Button And Just Have It.

Those Walls And Bars Are There For A Reason,” Said Crake. “not To Keep Us Out, But To Keep Them In. Mankind Needs Barriers In Both Cases.” “them?” “nature And God.” “i Thought You Didn’t Believe In God,” Said Jimmy. “i Don’t Believe In Nature Either,” Said Crake. “or Not With A Capital N.

Love Was Like A Steamroller. There Was No Avoiding It; It Went Over You And You Came Out Flat.

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

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.

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.

Things Written Down Can Cause A Great Deal Of Harm. All Too Often, People Don't Consider That.

All Fat Women Look The Same; They All Look 42.

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.

What Breaks In Daybreak? Is It The Night? Is It The Sun, Cracked In Two By The Horizon Like An Egg, Spilling Out Light?

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.

Some Bioengineering Is Good, Especially If It Results In Plants That Are More Drought-resistant Or Perennial Food Crops.

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.

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.

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

Don't Eat Anything You Aren't Prepared To Kill. Don't Kill Anything You Aren't Prepared To Eat.

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.

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.

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

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.

A Fist Is More Than The Sum Of Its Fingers.

Mathematical Logic

Writing... Is An Act Of Faith: I Believe It's Also An Act Of Hope, The Hope That Things Can Get Better Than They Are.

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

It's A Critical Fallacy Of Our Times ... That A Writer Should 'grow,' 'change,' Or 'develop.' This Fallacy Causes Us To Expect From Children Or Radishes: 'grow,' Or There's Something Wrong With You. But Writers Are Not Radishes. If You Look At What Most Writers Actually Do, It Resembles A Theme With Variations More Than It Does The Popular Notion Of Growth.

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.

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.

The Objects I Chose Were Designed To Hold Something, But I Didn't Fill Them Up. They Remained Empty. They Were Little Symbolic Shrines To Thirst.

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