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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.

-Margaret Atwood

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Within One's Own Family

Margaret Atwood

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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.

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Our Problem Right Now Is That We're So Specialized That If The Lights Go Out, There Are A Huge Number Of People Who Are Not Going To Know What To Do. But Within Every Dystopia There's A Little Utopia.

Today On The Way Home, It Snows. Big, Soft Caressing Flakes Fall Onto Our Skin Like Cold Moths; The Air Fills With Feathers.

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.

Expectation Isn't The Same As Desire

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

Your Friend Is Intellectually Honourable," Jimmy's Mother Would Say. "he Doesn't Lie To Himself.

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.

The Weapons That Were Once Outside Sharpening Themselves On War Are Now Indoors There, In The Fortress, Fragile In Glass Cases; Why Is It (i'm Thinking Of The Careful Moulding Round The Stonework Archways) That In This Time, Such Elaborate Defences Keep Things That Are No Longer (much) Worth Defending?

For The Children With Their Greedy Little Mouths Represent The Future, Which Like Time Itself Will Devour All Now Alive.

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.

Somebody Has Been A Complete Ratbag All Their Life And They've Gotten Away With It, And They Die Happy And Rich, We So Much Want To Believe That They're Going Off To The Halls Of Judgment, That Their Heart Will Be Weighed Against The Feather Of Truth, That It Will Be Heavy With Sin And It Will Be Eaten By A Crocodile. It's Almost Essential To Our Well-being To Have A Fallback Position Like That. It May Appear As If You've Gotten Away With It, But You'll Pay For It Later.

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

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

The Trickle-down Theory Of Economics Has It That It's Good For Rich People To Get Even Richer Because Some Of Their Wealth Will Trickle Own, Through Their No Doubt Lavish Spending, Upon Those Who Stand Below Them On The Economic Ladder. Notice That The Metaphor Is Not That Of A Gushing Waterfall But Of A Leaking Tap: Even The Most Optimistic Endorsers Of This Concept Do Not Picture Very Much Real Flow, As Their Language Reveals" Pg. 102.

I Never Have [suffered Writer’s Block], Although I’ve Had Books That Didn’t Work Out. I Had To Stop Writing Them. I Just Abandoned Them. It Was Depressing, But It Wasn’t The End Of The World. When It Really Isn’t Working, And You’ve Been Bashing Yourself Against The Wall, It’s Kind Of A Relief. I Mean, Sometimes You Bash Yourself Against The Wall And You Get Through It. But Sometimes The Wall Is Just A Wall. There’s Nothing To Be Done But Go Somewhere Else.

Stick A Shovel Into The Ground Almost Anywhere And Some Horrible Thing Or Other Will Come To Light. Good For Trade, We Thrive On Bones; Without Them There'd Be No Stories.

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.

Speculative Fiction Encompasses That Which We Could Actually Do. Sci-fi Is That Which We're Probably Not Going To See.

Speculative Fiction

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.

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.

Nature Full Strength Is More Than We Can Take, Adam One Used To Say. It's A Potent Hallucinogen, A Soporific, For The Untrained Soul. We're No Longer At Home In It. We Need To Dilute It. We Can't Drink It Straight. And God Is The Same. Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.

This Is How The Girl Who Couldn't Speak And The Man Who Couldn't See Fell In Love.

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.

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

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

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

A Home Filled With Nothing But Yourself. It's Heavy, That Lightness. It's Crushing, That Emptiness.

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.

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

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?

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

When You're Unhinged, Things Make Their Way Out Of You That Should Be Kept Inside, And Other Things Get In That Ought To Be Shut Out. The Locks Lose Their Powers. The Guards Go To Sleep. The Passwords Fail.

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.

He Doesn't Know Which Is Worse, A Past He Can't Regain Or A Present That Will Destroy Him If He Looks At It Too Clearly. Then There's The Future. Sheer Vertigo.

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.

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

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.

Immortality,' Said Crake, ' Is A Concept. If You Take 'mortality' As Being, Not Death, But The Foreknowledge Of It And The Fear Of It, Then 'immortality' Is The Absence Of Such Fear. Babies Are Immortal. Edit Out The Fear, And You'll Be.

There's Nothing Like A Shovel Full Of Dirt To Encourage Literacy.

The Reader Cannot See Into Your Heart. He Will Know Only What You Tell Him. Make The Blind See Your Words. Make The Hard-hearted Feel. Make The Deaf Hear.

What We Share May Be A Lot Like A Traffic Accident But We Get One Another. We Are Survivors Of Each Other. We Have Been Shark To One Another, But Also Lifeboat. That Counts For Something.

When Women Let Their Hair Down, It Means Either Sexiness Or Craziness Or Death, The Three By Victorian Times Having Become Virtually Synonymous.

I Learned To Read Very Early So I Could Read The Comics, Which I Then Started To Draw.

I'll Make You Mine, Lovers Said In Old Books. They Never Said, I'll Make You Me.

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

Farewells Can Be Shattering, But Returns Are Surely Worse. Solid Flesh Can Never Live Up To The Bright Shadow Cast By Its Absence.

More And More I Feel Like A Letter—deposited Here, Collected There. But A Letter Addressed To No One.

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

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.

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.

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

I Feel Like The Word Shatter.

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.

Oppression Involves A Failure Of The Imagination: The Failure To Imagine The Full Humanity Of Other Human Beings.

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

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.

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.

What Is The Real Breath Of A Man — The Breathing Out Or The Breathing In?

Sometimes Reactions Can Be Quite Surprising: Readers Like Things That You, The Author, Feel You've Barely Gotten Away With; Or They Dislike One Of The Parts You Secretly Think Is One Of Your Little Gems.

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 Habit He's Ever Had Is Still There In His Body, Lying Dormant Like Flowers In The Desert. Given The Right Conditions, All His Old Addictions Would Burst Into Full And Luxuriant Bloom.

Don’t Sit Down In The Middle Of The Woods. If You’re Lost In The Plot Or Blocked, Retrace Your Steps To Where You Went Wrong. Then Take The Other Road. And/or Change The Person. Change The Tense. Change The Opening Page.

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.

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.

Heroes Need Monsters To Establish Their Heroic Credentials. You Need Something Scary To Overcome.

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.

But Some People Can't Tell Where It Hurts. They Can't Calm Down. They Can't Ever Stop Howling.

Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamor To Be Heard, Though Silently.

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.

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

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.

War Is What Happens When Language Fails.

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

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.

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?

Happiness Is A Garden Walled With Glass: There's No Way In Or Out.

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

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

When We're Good, We're Very, Very Good, And When We're Bad, We're Horrid. This Is Not News, Because We're So Much More Inventive And We Have Two Hands, The Left And The Right. That Is How We Think. It's All Over Our Literature, And It's All Over The Way We Arrange Archetypes, The Good Version, The Bad Version, The God, The Devil, The Abel, The Cain, You Name It. We Arrange Things In Pairs Like That Because We Know About Ourselves.

I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.

I'm Not Interested In Cutting The Feet Off My Characters Or Stretching Them To Make Them Fit My Certain Political View.

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.

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

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.

I Think The Book You Always Like Best Is The One You're About To Write.

The Male Frog In Mating Season," Said Crake, "makes As Much Noise As It Can. The Females Are Attracted To The Male Frog With The Biggest, Deepest Voice Because It Suggests A More Powerful Frog, One With Superior Genes. Small Male Frogs—it's Been Documented—discover If They Position Themselves In Empty Drainpipes, The Pipe Acts As A Voice Amplifier And The Small Frog Appears Much Larger Than It Really Is." So?" So That's What Art Is For The Artist, An Empty Drainpipe. An Amplifier. A Stab At Getting Laid.

The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read. Not By Any Other Person, And Not Even By Yourself At Some Later Date. Otherwise You Begin Excusing Yourself. You Must See The Writing As Emerging Like A Long Scroll Of Ink From The Index Finger Of Your Right Hand; You Must See Your Left Hand Erasing It.

The Truly Fearless Think Of Themselves As Normal.

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.

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.

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

Hunger Is A Powerful Reorganizer Of The Conscience.

But We Still Find The World Astounding, We Can't Get Enough Of It; Even As It Shrivels, Even As Its Many Lights Flicker And Are Extinguished (the Tigers, The Leopard Frogs, The Plunging Dolphin Flukes), Flicker And Are Extinguished, By Us, By Us, We Gaze And Gaze. Where Do You Draw The Line, Between Love And Greed? We Never Did Know, We Always Wanted More. We Want To Take It All In, For One Last Time, We Want To Eat The World With Our Eyes.

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

In The End, We'll All Become Stories.

I Have A Big Following Among The Biogeeks Of This World. Nobody Ever Puts Them In Books.

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.

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

By Now You Know: I Come From Another Planet. But I Will Never Say To You, "take Me To Your Leaders." Even I--unused To Your Ways Though I Am--would Never Make That Mistake. We Ourselves Have Such Beings Among Us, Made Of Cogs, Pieces Of Paper, Small Disks Of Shiny Metal, Scraps Of Coloured Cloth. I Do Not Need To Encounter More Of Them. Instead I Will Say, "take Me To Your Trees. Take Me To Your Breakfasts, Your Sunsets, Your Bad Dreams, Your Shoes, Your Nouns. Take Me To Your Fingers; Take Me To Your Deaths." These Are Worth It. These Are What I Have Come For.

They Spent The First Three Years Of School Getting You To Pretend Stuff And Then The Rest Of It Marking You Down If You Did The Same Thing.

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.

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

The Biggest Debt Is Always The Government Debt; It's Always Debt That Government Has Run Up On Your Behalf.

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

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

Under The Old System - Which Is Now So Archaic That A Lot Of People Can't Remember It - If You Wanted Money You Had To Go To The Bank And Take The Money Out In Cash Form, And You Couldn't Take Out Money That You Didn't Have. But With The Credit Card You Can Spend Money You Don't Have, And That Is Just So Tempting.

Snowman Wakes Before Dawn.

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

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.

Nature Is To Zoos As God Is To Churches.

Publishing A Book Is Like Stuffing A Note Into A Bottle And Hurling It Into The Sea. Some Bottles Drown, Some Come Safe To Land, Where The Notes Are Read And Then Possibly Cherished, Or Else Misinterpreted, Or Else Understood All Too Well By Those Who Hate The Message. You Never Know Who Your Readers Might Be.

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

Our Biggest Technology That We Ever, Ever Invented Was Articulated Language With Built-out Grammar. It Is That That Allows Us To Imagine Things Far In The Future And Things Way Back In The Past.

These Things Sneak Up On Him For No Reason, These Flashes Of Irrational Happiness. It's Probably A Vitamin Deficiency.

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.

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.

They Are Hypocrites, They Think The Church Is A Cage To Keep God In, So He Will Stay Locked Up There And Not Go Wandering About The Earth During The Week, Poking His Nose Into Their Business, And Looking In The Depths And Darkness And Doubleness Of Their Hearts, And Their Lack Of True Charity; And They Believed They Need Only Be Bothered About Him On Sundays When They Have Their Best Clothes On And Their Faces Straight, And Their Hands Washed And Their Gloves On, And Their Stories All Prepared.

Plato Said That Poets Should Be Excluded From The Ideal Republic Because They Are Such Liars. I Am A Poet, And I Affirm That This Is True. About No Subject Are Poets Tempted To Lie So Much As About Their Own Lives; I Know One Of Them Who Has Floated At Least Five Versions Of His Autobiography, None Of Them True. I Of Course - Being Also A Novelist - Am A Much More Truthful Person Than That. But Since Poets Lie, How Can You Believe Me?

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

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.

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.

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

I Look Up At The Ceiling, Tracing The Foliage Of The Wreath. Today It Makes Me Think Of A Hat, The Large-brimmed Hats Women Used To Wear At Some Period During The Old Days: Hats Like Enormous Halos, Festooned With Fruit And Flowers, And The Feathers Of Exotic Birds; Hats Like An Idea Of Paradise, Floating Just Above The Head, A Thought Solidified.

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.

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

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

Money As Such Is, As Oscar Wilde Said, Perfectly Useless. You Can't Eat It, Drink It, Shelter Yourself From The Cold With It, Wear It, Or Make Love With It Unless Deeply Disturbed. In And Of Itself, It Has No Emotions, No Mind, And No Conscience. It Doesn't Put Out Flowers Or Have Children, And It Makes A Lousy Pet. It Has Meaning Only When It Circulates, And Is Exchanged For Other Things; And Money Doesn't Do That For Itself. People Do That, Using Money As A Symbolic Token.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Writers Are Much Better Behaved Nowadays, For A Couple Of Reasons. Once Upon A Time Nobody Was Thinking Of A Career, Unless You Lived In New York, So There Wasn't As Much Pressure To Present A Respectable Exterior. And Secondly, There Was No Social Media. So If You Were Found Face Down On The Floor - People Did Do That Quite A Bit; Usually Men, But Not Always - Or Fell Through Plate Glass Windows Or Got Into Scrapes, It Became A Rumor, And Rumors Are Hard To Pin Down.

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

Why Is It He Feels Some Line Has Been Crossed, Some Boundary Transgressed? How Much Is Too Much, How Far Is Too Far?

He Was Deciding Whether To Cut Her Throat Or Love Her Forever.

Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.

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

People Dressed In A Certain Kind Of Clothing Are Never Wrong. Also They Never Fart.

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.

We've Learned To See The World In Gasps.

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

It Made Him Feel Invisible—not That He Wanted To Feel Anything Else.

Time Is Not A Line But A Dimension, Like The Dimensions Of Space.

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.

I Grew Up With The Biologists. I Know How They Think.

You Aren't Sick & Unhappy Only Alive & Stuck With It.

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

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

Whatever The Scientists May Come Up With, Writers And Artists Will Continue To Portray Altered Mental States, Simply Because Few Aspects Of Our Nature Fascinate People So Much. The So-called Mad Person Will Always Represent A Possible Future For Every Member Of The Audience - Who Knows When Such A Malady May Strike?

Eating Is Our Earliest Metaphor, Preceding Our Consciousness Of Gender Difference, Race, Nationality, And Language. We Eat Before We Talk.

He's Lost Something, Some Illusion I Used To Think Was Necessary To Him. He's Come To Realize He Too Is Human. Or Is This A Performance, For My Benefit, To Show Me He's Up-to-date? Maybe Men Shouldn't Have Been Told About Their Own Humanity. It's Only Made Them Uncomfortable. It's Only Made Them Trickier, Slier, More Evasive, Harder To Read.

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

We All Know That A Book Is Not Really A Person. It Isn’t A Human Being. But If You Are A Lover Of Books As Books – As Objects, That Is – And Ignore The Human Element In Them – That Is, Their Voices – You Will Be Committing An Error Of The Soul, Because You Will Be An Idolator, Or Else A Fetishist.

Another Belief Of Mine; That Everyone Else My Age Is An Adult, Whereas I Am Merely In Disguise.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Never Pray For Justice, Because You Might Get Some.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This Above All, To Refuse To Be A Victim.

Reading Is One Of The Most Individual Things That Happens. So Every Reader Is Going To Read A Piece In A Slightly Different Way, Sometimes A Radically Different Way.

How Furious She Must Be, Now That She's Been Taken At Her Word.

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

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.

I See That There Will Be No End To Imperfection, Or To Doing Things The Wrong Way. Even If You Grow Up, No Matter How Hard You Scrub, Whatever You Do, There Will Always Be Some Other Stain Or Spot On Your Face Or Stupid Act, Somebody Frowning.

But Nothing Is More Opaque Than Absolute Transparency.

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

There Is Good And Mediocre Writing Within Every Genre.

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.

Jimmy Had Been Full Of Himself Back Then, Thinks Snowman With Indulgence And A Little Envy. He’d Been Unhappy Too, Of Course. It Went Without Saying, His Unhappiness. He’d Put A Lot Of Energy Into It.

...we Must Be A Beacon Of Hope, Because If You Tell People There's Nothing They Can Do, They Will Do Worse Than Nothing.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Every Night When I Go To Bed I Think, In The Morning I Will Wake Up In My Own House And Things Will Be Back The Way They Were. It Hasn’t Happened This Morning, Either.

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

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.

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.

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.

We'll Choose Knowledge No Matter What, We'll Maim Ourselves In The Process, We'll Stick Our Hands Into The Flames For It If Necessary. Curiosity Is Not Our Only Motive; Love Or Grief Or Despair Or Hatred Is What Drives Us On. We'll Spy Relentlessly On The Dead; We'll Open Their Letters, We'll Read Their Journals, We'll Go Through Their Trash, Hoping For A Hint, A Final Word, An Explanation, From Those Who Have Deserted Us--who've Left Us Holding The Bag, Which Is Often A Good Deal Emptier Than We'd Supposed.

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

Most Mothers Worry When Their Daughters Reach Adolescence But I Was The Opposite. I Relaxed, I Sighed With Relief. Little Girls Are Cute And Small Only To Adults. To One Another They Are Not Cute. They Are Life Sized.

My Brother And I Were Both Teenage Writers, And He Was, I Have To Say, Better Than I Was, But He Went Into Science, And I Went Into Writing.

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

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?

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

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.

Making Final Judgements About Poets, Cities Or Regions On The Basis Of An Anthology Is Always Dangerous: Anthologies Are Mirages Created, Finally, By Their Editors.

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