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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.

-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.

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

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

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

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.

A Hot Wind Was Blowing Around My Head, The Strands Of My Hair Lifting And Swirling In It, Like Ink Spilled In Water.

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

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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.

Thy Only Authentic Ending Is The One Provided Here: John And Mary Die, John And Mary Die, John And Mary Die.

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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.

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Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror.

This Above All, To Refuse To Be A Victim.

So Much For Endings. Beginnings Are Always More Fun. True Connoisseurs, However, Are Known To Favor The Stretch In Between, Since It's The Hardest To Do Anything With. That's About All That Can Be Said For Plots, Which Anyway Are Just One Thing After Another, A What And A What And A What.

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Popular Art Is The Dream Of Society; It Does Not Examine Itself.

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

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Her Glass Wings Are Gone.

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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.

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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?

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

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Our Heaven Is Their Hell, Said God. I Like A Balanced Universe.

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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.

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You Say, The Sensed Absence Of God And The Sensed Presence Amount To Much The Same Thing, Only In Reverse.

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You Can't Keep A Cool Head When You're Drowning In Love. You Just Trash Around A Lot And Scream, And Wear Yourself Out.

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

You Can Think Clearly Only With Your Clothes On.

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

We Battled In Secret, Undeclared, And After A While I No Longer Fought Back Because I Never Won. The Only Defense Was Flight, Invisibility.

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.

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

You Can Wet The Rim Of A Glass And Run Your Finger Around The Rim And It Will Make A Sound. This Is What I Feel Like: This Sound Of Glass. I Feel Like The Word Shatter. I Want To Be With Someone.

So Crake Never Remembered His Dreams. It's Snowman That Remembers Them Instead. Worse Than Remembers: He's Immersed In Them, He'd Wading Through Them, He's Stuck In Them. Every Moment He's Lived In The Past Few Months Was Dreamed First By Crake. No Wonder Crake Screamed So Much.

No Mother Is Ever, Completely, A Child's Idea Of What A Mother Should Be, And I Suppose It Works The Other Way Around As Well. But Despite Everything, We Didn't Do Too Badly By One Another, We Did As Well As Most.

Writing Poetry Is A State Of Free Float.

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.

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

Gardening Is Not A Rational Act. What Matters Is The Immersion Of The Hands In The Earth, That Ancient Ceremony Of Which The Pope Kissingthe Tarmac Is Merely A Pallid Vestigial Remnant.

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

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

The Truth, It Seems, Is Not Just What You Find When You Open A Door: It Is Itself A Door, Which The Poet Is Always On The Verge Of Going Through.

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.

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

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

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Better Not To Invent Her In Her Absence. Better To Wait Until She's Actually Here. Then He Can Make Her Up As She Goes Along.

Fiction Is Not Necessarily About What You Know, It's About How You Feel. That Is The Truth About Fiction, And The Other Truth Is That All Science Is A Tool, And We Use Our Tools Not To Actualise What We Know, But To Implement How We Feel.

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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.

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.

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

In The Animal World Individuals Cheat, As Do We.

The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read.

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.

I Didn't Want Him To Become Gray And Multi-dimensional And Complicated Like Everyone Else. Was Every Heathcliff A Linton In Disguise?

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.

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

It Isn't Chic For Women To Be Drunk. Men Drunks Are More Excusable, More Easily Absolved, But Why? It Must Be Thought They Have Better Reasons.

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.

Waste Not Want Not. I Am Not Being Wasted. Why Do I Want?

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

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.

In My Dreams Of This City I Am Always Lost.

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.

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.

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

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

Every Utopia - Let's Just Stick With The Literary Ones - Faces The Same Problem: What Do You Do With The People Who Don't Fit In?

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.

Please Don't Make The Mistake Of Thinking That 'oryx And Crake' Is Anti-science. Science Is A Way Of Knowing, And A Tool. Like All Ways Of Knowing And Tools, It Can Be Turned To Bad Uses. And It Can Be Bought And Sold, And It Often Is. But It Is Not In Itself Bad. Like Electricity, It's Neutral.

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

To Live In Prison Is To Live Without Mirrors. To Live Without Mirrors Is To Live Without The Self.

Come Away With Me, He Said, We Will Live On A Desert Island. I Said, I Am A Desert Island. It Was Not What He Had In Mind.

I'm Interested In The Gothic Novel Because It's Very Much A Woman's Form. Why Is There Such A Wide Readership For Books That Essentially Say, 'your Husband Is Trying To Kill You'?

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.

I Feel Like The Word Shatter.

When They're Gone Out Of His Head, These Words, They'll Be Gone, Everywhere, Forever. As If They Had Never Been.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Time Has Not Stood Still. It Has Washed Over Me, Washed Me Away, As If I'm Nothing More Than A Woman Of Sand, Left By A Careless Child Too Near The Water.

God Gave Unto The Animals A Wisdom Past Our Power To See: Each Knows Innately How To Live, Which We Must Learn Laboriously.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I Sink Down Into My Body As Into A Swamp, Fenland, Where Only I Know The Footing…. I’m A Cloud, Congealed Around A Central Object, The Shape Of A Pear, Which Is Hard And More Real Than I Am And Glows Red Within Its Translucent Wrapping. Inside It Is A Space, Huge As The Sky At Night And Dark And Curved Like That, Though Black-red Rather Than Black.

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.

I'm Not Sure I Really Am A Humanist. I Describe Myself As A Rigorous Agnostic, Which Means That You Cannot Declare As A Matter Of Material Truth Something That Is In Fact A Matter Of Spiritual Belief.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Debt Is Part Of The Human Condition. Civilization Is Based On Exchanges - On Gifts, Trades, Loans - And The Revenges And Insults That Come When They Are Not Paid Back.

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

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

Bodily Functions

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.

Why Are We Designed To See The World As Supremely Beautiful Just As We're About To Be Snuffed? Do Rabbits Feel The Same As The Fox Teeth Bite Down On Their Necks? Is It Mercy?

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.

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.

All Stories Are About Wolves. All Worth Repeating, That Is. Anything Else Is Sentimental Drivel. ...think About It. There's Escaping From The Wolves, Fighting The Wolves, Capturing The Wolves, Taming The Wolves. Being Thrown To The Wolves, Or Throwing Others To The Wolves So The Wolves Will Eat Them Instead Of You. Running With The Wolf Pack. Turning Into A Wolf. Best Of All, Turning Into The Head Wolf. No Other Decent Stories Exist.

Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Understand The Dead, I've Found; But Nothing Is More Dangerous Than To Ignore Them.

Can I Be Blamed For Wanting A Real Body, To Put My Arms Around? Without It I Too Am Disembodied. I Can Listen To My Own Heartbeat Against The Bedsprings...but There’s Something Dead About It, Something Deserted.

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.

How Old Do You Have To Get Before Wisdom Descends Like A Plastic Bag Over Your Head And You Learn To Keep Your Big Mouth Shut? Maybe Never. Maybe You Get More Frivolous With Age.

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

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

Being Edited Is Like Falling Face Down Into A Threshing Machine.

But Nothing Is More Opaque Than Absolute Transparency.

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.

Messy Love Is Better Than None, I Guess. I Am No Authority On Sane Living.

We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

The Animals Have No Need For Speech, Why Talk When You Are A Word.

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

... 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.

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

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

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.

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

And Sometimes It Happened, For A Time. That Kind Of Love Comes And Goes And Is Hard To Remember Afterwards, Like Pain. You Would Look At The Man One Day And You Would Think, I Loved You, And The Tense Would Be Past, And You Would Be Filled With A Sense Of Wonder, Because It Was Such An Amazing And Precarious And Dumb Thing To Have Done; And You Would Know Too Why Your Friends Have Been Evasive About It, At The Time.

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

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 No Longer Feel I'll Be Dead By Thirty; Now It's Sixty. I Suppose These Deadlines We Set For Ourselves Are Really A Way Of Saying We Appreciate Time, And Want To Use All Of It. I'm Still Writing, I'm Still Writing Poetry, I Still Can't Explain Why, And I'm Still Running Out Of Time.

Nature Is An Expert In Cost-benefit Analysis,' She Says. 'although She Does Her Accounting A Little Differently. As For Debts, She Always Collects In The Long Run.

Cost Benefit Analysis

Where To Start Is The Problem, Because Nothing Begins When It Begins And Nothing's Over When It's Over, And Everything Needs A Preface: A Preface, A Postscript, A Chart Of Simultaneous Events.

Modesty Is Invisibility... Never Forget It. To Be Seen - To Be Seen - Is To Be... Penetrated. What You Must Be Girls, Is Impenetrable.

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.

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.

All Fathers Are Invisible In Daytime; Daytime Is Ruled By Mothers And Fathers Come Out At Night. Darkness Brings Home Fathers, With Their Real, Unspeakable Power. There Is More To Fathers Than Meets The Eye.

I Saw All Of The Films [based On The Tempest] Available, Including The One With Helen Mirren In Which Prospero Is Prospera - You Wonder, "would It Work?" But It Does, Because Anything She Does Works.

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