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When You're Young, You Think Everything You Do Is Disposable. You Move From Now To Now, Crumpling Time Up In Your Hands, Tossing It Away. You're Your Own Speeding Car. You Think You Can Get Rid Of Things, And People Too—leave Them Behind. You Don't Yet Know About The Habit They Have, Of Coming Back. Time In Dreams Is Frozen. You Can Never Get Away From Where You've Been.

-Margaret Atwood

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When You're Young, You

Margaret Atwood

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When You're Young, You Think Everything You Do Is Disposable. You Move From Now To Now, Crumpling Time Up In Your Hands, Tossing It Away. You're Your Own Speeding Car. You Think You Can Get Rid Of Things, And People Too—leave Them Behind. You Don't Yet Know About The Habit They Have, Of Coming Back. Time In Dreams Is Frozen. You Can Never Get Away From Where You've Been.

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Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

A Lot Of Being A Poet Consists Of Willed Ignorance. If You Woke Up From Your Trance And Realized The Nature Of The Life-threatening And Dignity-destroying Precipice You Were Walking Along, You Would Switch Into Actuarial Sciences Immediately.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Some Cleric Putting A Match To Her. /neither Of Them Looks Happy About It. /once Lit, She'll Burn Like A Book, /like A Book That Was Ever Finished, /like A Locked-up Library.

To Want Is To Have A Weakness.

The Three Of Them Were Beautiful, In The Way All Girls Of That Age Are Beautiful. It Can't Be Helped, That Sort Of Beauty, Nor Can It Be Conserved; It's A Freshness, A Plumpness Of The Cells, That's Unearned And Temporary, And That Nothing Can Replicate. None Of Them Was Satisfied With It, However; Already They Were Making Attempts To Alter Themselves Into Some Impossible, Imaginary Mould, Plucking And Pencilling Away At Their Faces. I Didn't Blame Them, Having Done The Same Once Myself.

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.

Expectation Isn't The Same As Desire

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.

The Future Of Narrative? Built In, Part Of The Human Template. Not Going Away.

Science Fiction Is Filled With Martians And Space Travel To Other Planets, And Things Like That.

If Social Stability Goes Pear-shaped, You Have A Choice Between Anarchy And Dictatorship. Most People Will Opt For More Security, Even If They Have To Give Up Some Personal Freedom.

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.

I Am Certain That A Sewing Machine Would Relieve As Much Human Suffering As A Hundred Lunatic Asylums, And Possibly A Good Deal More.

Lunatic Asylums

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.

This Above All, To Refuse To Be A Victim.

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

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

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

Madness Is Only An Amplification Of What You Already Are.

All Writers Must Go From Now To Once A Upon A Time; All Must Go From Here To There; All Must Descend To Where The Stories Are Kept; All Must Take Care Not To Be Captured And Held Immobile By The Past.

If He Wants To Be An Asshole, It's A Free Country. Millions Before Him Have Made The Same Life Choice.

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?

I Define Science Fiction As Fiction In Which Things Happen That Are Not Possible Today - That Depend, For Instance, On Advanced Space Travel, Time Travel, The Discovery Of Green Monsters On Other Planets Or Galaxies, Or That Contain Various Technologies We Have Not Yet Developed.

There's More Than One Way To Skin A Cat, My Father Used To Say; It Bothered Me, I Didn't See Why They Would Want To Skin A Cat Even One Way.

Make The Verses Flow Together. If A Following Verse Has Nothing To Do With The Previous, You May Lose Our Listener/reader. You Want A Smooth Flow To Hear Or Read, And It's Easier To Memorize.

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.

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

Keeping Secrets

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.

But The Adjectives Change,” Said Jimmy. “nothing’s Worse Than Last Year’s Adjectives.

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.

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

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.

You Shouldn't Do That," Said Laura. "you Could Set Yourself On Fire.

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.

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.

Then Sail, My Fine Lady, On The Billowing Wave - The Water Below Is As Dark As The Grave, And Maybe You'll Sink In Your Little Blue Boat - It's Hope, And Hope Only, That Keeps Us Afloat

Inside The Peach, There Is A Stone.

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 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.'

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

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.

Either I'm Alive Or I'm Dying, She Said To Daniel. Please Don't Feel You Can't Tell Me. Which Is It? Which Does It Feel Like? Said Daniel. He Patted Her Hand. You're Not Dead Yet. You're A Lot More Alive Than Many People. This Isn't Good Enough For Rennie. She Wants Something Definite, The Real Truth, One Way Or The Other. Then She Will Know What She Should Do Next. It's This Suspension, Hanging In A Void, This Half-life She Can't Bear. She Can't Bear Not Knowing. She Doesn't Want To Know.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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'm Not An Activist By Nature. I Am Suspicious Of Utopian Thinking And Equally Suspicious Of Its Alternate. I Would Prefer To Stay In The Writing Burrow And Play With My Imaginary Friends And Enemies. I Get Sucked Into These Things.

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

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.

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

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

But Maybe, Underneath, She Loves Him Too Much. Maybe It's Her Excessive Love That Pushes Him Away.

I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.

do Back Exercises. Pain Is Distracting.

I Exist In Two Places, Here And Where You Are.

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

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.

All You Have To Do, I Tell Myself, Is Keep Your Mouth Shut And Look Stupid. It Shouldn't Be That Hard.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

What People Want Is Perfection," Said The Man. "in Themselves." "but They Need The Steps To It To Be Pointed Out," Said The Woman. "in A Simple Order," Said The Man. "with Encouragement," Said The Woman. "and A Positive Attitude.

If You Want What's In The Package You Should At Least Know How To Get The String Off, Is What I Say.

You Can Think Clearly Only With Your Clothes On.

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

Literature Is Not Only A Mirror; It Is A Map, A Geography Of The Mind.

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

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.

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.

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

All Creatures Know That Some Must Die That All The Rest May Take And Eat; Sooner Or Later, All Transform Their Blood To Wine, Their Flesh To Meat. But Man Alone Seeks Vengefulness, And Writes His Abstract Laws On Stone; For This False Justice He Has Made, He Tortures Limb And Crushes Bone. Is This The Image Of A God? My Tooth For Yours, Your Eye For Mine? Oh, If Revenge Did Move The Stars Instead Of Love, They Would Not Shine.

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.

Richard Liked To Say He Picked Things Up For A Song, Which Was Odd, Because He Never Sang. He Never Even Whistled. He Was Not A Musical Person.

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.

When A Man Is Attacked In Print, It's Usually For Saying What He Says; When A Woman Is Attacked In Print, It's Often For Being Who She Is.

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.

I Don't Find The Idea Of Sewing Degrading. A Thing Is Degrading When You Are Forced To Do It, Through Economic Reasons Or Through Slavery Or Some Other Form Of Compulsion.

A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power.

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.

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

Nature Is To Zoos As God Is To Churches.

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.

I Hope That People Will Finally Come To Realize That There Is Only One 'race' - The Human Race - And That We Are All Members Of It.

Plague Has Hung Over Human History. The Biggest Human Extinction Was After 1492 In North And South America When The Mortality Rate Was 95 Per Cent, Which Is Enormous. But Again, I'm Actually Giving You Grounds For Optimism: There Were Enough To Continue. The Five Per Cent Who Made It Through Are What You Need To Survive A Bottleneck, Which We Have Been Through Before.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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!

Anaesthesia, That's One Technique: If It Hurts, Invent A Different Pain.

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

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

The Beginning Of Canadian Cultural Nationalism Was Not 'am I Really That Oppressed?' But 'am I Really That Boring?'

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

Time Is Compressed Like The Fist I Close On My Knee... I Hold Inside It The Clues And Solutions And The Power For What I Must Do Now.

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.

Now That I Am Dead, I Know Everything.

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

As Soon As You Have A Language That Has A Past Tense And A Future Tense You're Going To Say, 'where Did We Come From, What Happens Next?' The Ability To Remember The Past Helps Us Plan The Future.

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.

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

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

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.

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'.

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.

I'm A Red Tory. To Get A Fix On This Category, You Have To Go Back To The 19th Century. The Tories Were The Ones Who Believed That Those In Power Had A Responsibility To The Community, That Money Should Not Be The Measure Of All Things.

If You Get Hungry Enough, They Say, You Start Eating Your Own Heart.

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

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

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

I Think Of Bad News As A Huge Bird, With The Wings Of A Crow And The Face Of My Grade Four School Teacher, Sparse Bun, Rancid Teeth, Wrinkly Frown, Pursed Mouth And All, Sailing Around The World Under Cover Of Darkness Pleased To Be The Bearer Of Ill Tidings, Carrying A Basket Of Rotten Eggs, And Knowing- As The Sun Comes Up- Exactly Where To Drop Them. On Me, For One.

I’m Not Used To Girls, Or Familiar With Their Customs. I Feel Awkward Around Them, I Don’t Know What To Say. I Know The Unspoken Rules Of Boys, But With Girls I Sense That I Am Always On The Verge Of Some Unforeseen, Calamitous Blunder.

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.

If You're Put On A Pedestal, You're Supposed To Behave Yourself Like A Pedestal Type Of Person. Pedestals Actually Have A Limited Circumference. Not Much Room To Move Around.

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

... All This Talking, This Rather Liquid Confessing, Was Something I Didn't Think I Could Ever Bring Myself To Do. It Seemed Foolhardy To Me, Like An Uncooked Egg Deciding To To Come Out Of Its Shell: There Would Be A Risk Of Spreading Out Too Far, Turning Into A Formless Puddle.

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

As An Artist Your First Loyalty Is To Your Art. Unless This Is The Case, You're Going To Be A Second-rate Artist.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Cat Jumps Up On The Bed And Tries To Get Onto My Head. It's His Way Of Telling Whether Or Not I'm Dead. If I'm Not, He Wants To Be Scratched; If I Am - He'll Think Of Something

These Things You Did Were Like Prayers; You Did Them And You Hoped They Would Save You. And For The Most Part They Did. Or Something Did; You Could Tell By The Fact That You Were Still Alive.

I Wish This Story Were Different. I Wish It Were More Civilized. I Wish It Showed Me In A Better Light, If Not Happier, Than At Least More Active, Less Hesitant, Less Distracted By Trivia. I Wish It Had More Shape. I Wish T Were About Love, Or About Sudden Realizations Important To One’s Life, Or Even About Sunsets, Birds, Rainstorms, Or Snow. I’m Sorry There Is So Much Pain In This Story. I’m Sorry It’s In Fragments, Like A Body Caught In Crossfire Or Pulled Apart By Force. But There Is Nothing I Can Do To Change It.

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.

The One Good Thing To Be Said About Announcing Yourself As A Writer In The Colonial Canadian Fifties Is That Nobody Told Me I Couldn't Do It Because I Was A Girl. They Simply Found The Entire Proposition Ridiculous. Writers Were Dead And English, Or Else Extremely Elderly And American; They Were Not Sixteen Years Old And Canadian.

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.

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.

Soon It Will Be Daybreak. Soon The Day Will Break. I Can't Stop It From Breaking In The Same Way It Always Does, And Then From Lying There Broken; Always The Same Day, Which Comes Around Again Like Clockwork. It Begins With The Day Before The Day Before, And Then The Day Before, And Then It's The Day Itself. A Saturday. The Breaking Day. The Day The Butcher Comes.

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

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

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.

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.

You Meet The Same People On The Way Down That You Meet On The Way Up, But You're Going The Other Way.

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.

Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.

Those Who Live Alone Slide Into The Habit Of Vertical Eating: Why Bother With The Niceties When There's No One To Share Or Censure? But Laxity In One Area May Lead To Derangement In All.

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.

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.

There May Not Be One Truth - There May Be Several Truths - But Saying That Is Not To Say That Reality Doesn't Exist.

I Don't Think The Relationship Between Novels And Realities Are One To One. Of Course Novels Play Different Roles. It's Essentially Just A Long Narrative Form. What You Use That Long Narrative Form For Can Be Very Different.

Things Musicals Taught Me: All Your Problems Will Go Away If You Sing About It.

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

I Was Once A Graduate Student In Victorian Literature, And I Believe As The Victorian Novelists Did, That A Novel Isn't Simply A Vehicle For Private Expression, But That It Also Exists For Social Examination. I Firmly Believe This.

This Has Been Her Problem All Her Life: Picturing Other People's Responses. She's Too Good At It. She Can Picture The Response Of Anyone--other People's Reactions, Their Emotions, Their Criticisms, Their Demands--but Somehow They Don't Reciprocate. Maybe They Can't. Maybe They Lack The Gift, If It Is One.

By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, 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. So I Will Go On. So I Will Myself To Go On.

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.

For If The World Treats You Well, Sir, You Come To Believe You Are Deserving Of It.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Without The Protection Of Surliness And Levity, All Children Would Be Crushed By The Past—the Past Of Others, Loaded Onto Their Shoulders. Selfishness Is Their Saving Grace.

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

You Will Always Have Partial Points Of View, And You'll Always Have The Story Behind The Story That Hasn't Come Out Yet. And Any Form Of Journalism You're Involved With Is Going To Be Up Against A Biased Viewpoint And Partial Knowledge.

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

We Shouldn't Have Been So Scornful; We Should Have Had Compassion. But Compassion Takes Work, And We Were Young.

Snowman Wakes Before Dawn.

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.

I Feel Like The Word Shatter.

As All Historians Know, The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Echoes. Voices May Reach Us From It; But What They Say To Us Is Imbued With The Obscurity Of The Matrix Out Of Which They Come; And Try As We May, We Cannot Always Decipher Them Precisely In The Clearer Light Of Our Day.

The Idea Of The Chickens With The Multiple Breasts And Thighs Came From An Urban Legend That Some Fast-food Places Had Developed Chickens With Four Thighs. It Wasn't True, But It Is A Suggestive Rumor.

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.

It's Only Afterwards That It Becomes Anything Like A Story At All. When You're Telling It, To Yourself Or To Someone Else.

Shattered Glass

Why Does The Mind Do Such Things? Turn On Us, Rend Us, Dig The Claws In. If You Get Hungry Enough, They Say, You Start Eating Your Own Heart. Maybe It's Much The Same.

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

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?

Writing Is Alone, But I Don't Think It's Lonely. Ask Any Writer If They Feel Lonely When They're Writing Their Book, And I Think They'll Say No.

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.

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.

The Darkness Is Really Out There. It's Not Something That's In My Head, Just. It's In My Work Because It's In The World.

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

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.

That Was When They Suspended The Constitution. They Said It Would Be Temporary. There Wasn't Even Any Rioting In The Streets. People Stayed Home At Night, Watching Television, Looking For Some Direction. There Wasn't Even An Enemy You Could Put Your Finger On.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We Are Very Short On Organs, And The Pig Solution Is Probably A Lot Better Than The Human Clone Solution - Though Maybe Not For The Pigs.

I Would Rather Dance As A Ballerina, Though Faultily, Than As A Flawless Clown.

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.

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

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