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You Can Never Read Your Own Book With The Innocent Anticipation That Comes With That First Delicious Page Of A New Book, Because You Wrote The Thing. You've Been Backstage. You've Seen How The Rabbits Were Smuggled Into The Hat. Therefore Ask A Reading Friend Or Two To Look At It Before You Give It To Anyone In The Publishing Business. This Friend Should Not Be Someone With Whom You Have A romantic Relationship, Unless You Want To Break Up.

-Margaret Atwood

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You Can Never Read

Margaret Atwood

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You Can Never Read Your Own Book With The Innocent Anticipation That Comes With That First Delicious Page Of A New Book, Because You Wrote The Thing. You've Been Backstage. You've Seen How The Rabbits Were Smuggled Into The Hat. Therefore Ask A Reading Friend Or Two To Look At It Before You Give It To Anyone In The Publishing Business. This Friend Should Not Be Someone With Whom You Have A romantic Relationship, Unless You Want To Break Up.

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There Would Be No Sherlock Holmes If It Were Not For Serial Publication.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Bodily Functions

For Me The Experience Of Writing Is Really An Experience Of Losing Control.... I Think It's Very Much Like Dreaming Or Like Surfing. You Go Out There And Wait For A Wave, And When It Comes It Takes You Somewhere And You Don't Know Where It'll Go.

It's Doors I'm Afraid Of Because I Can't See Through Them, Its The Door Opening By Itself In The Wind I'm Afraid Of.

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

In My Dreams Of This City I Am Always Lost.

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.

Inside The Peach, There Is A Stone.

When Faced With The Inevitable, You Always Have A Choice... As I Learned During My Liberal Arts Education, Any Symbol Can Have, In The Imaginative Context, Two Versions, A Positive And A Negative... If You Spill Your Milk You're Left With A Glass Which Is Either Half Empty Or Half Full... 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.

You Always Think, 'oh, If Only I Had A Little Chalet In The Mountains! How Great That Would Be And I'd Do All This Writing' Except, No, I Wouldn't. I'd Do The Same Amount Of Writing I Do Now And The Rest Of The Time I'd Go Stir Crazy. 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.

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?

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

The Object Is Very Clear In The Fight Against Racism; You Have Reasons Why You're Opposed To It. But When You're Writing A Novel, You Don't Want The Reader To Come Out Of It Voting Yes Or No To Some Question. Life Is More Complicated Than That.

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 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.

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'.

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

I've Been Involved In Activities With Other People Who Were Put In Jail. We Were Protesting The Closing Of The Prison Farm Program At The Prison I Used In A Previous Book, Alias Grace. Some Of Us Also Put Up Money In Order To Save The Heirloom Herd Of Cows There. So I Own Half A Cow!

I Feel Like Cotton Candy: Sugar And Air. Squeeze Me And I’d Turn Into A Small Sickly Damp Wad Of Weeping Pinky-red.

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?

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.

Walking Along Past The Store Windows, Into Which She Peers With Her Usual Eagerness, Her Usual Sense That Maybe, Today, She Will Discover Behind Them Something That Will Truly Be Worth Seeing, She Feels As If Her Feet Are Not On Cement At All But On Ice. The Blade Of The Skate Floats, She Knows, On A Thin Film Of Water, Which It Melts By Pressure And Which Freezes Behind It. This Is The Freedom Of The Present Tense, This Sliding Edge.

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.

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.

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

If You Disagree With Your Government, That's Political. If You Disagree With Your Government That Is Approaching Theocracy, Then You're Evil.

In The Animal World Individuals Cheat, As Do We.

You Can Think Clearly Only With Your Clothes On.

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.

Why Do Men Feel Threatened By Women?

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.

He Has Been Trying To Sing Love Into Existence Again And He Has Failed

Winning Intoxicates You, And Numbs You To The Sufferings Of Others.

Suffering Of Others

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

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.

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

Without The Light, No Chance; Without The Dark, No Dance.

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

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.

He Stops, Looks Up At This Window, And I Can See The White Oblong Of His Face. We Look At Each Other. I Have No Rose To Toss, He Has No Lute. But It's The Same Kind Of Hunger.

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

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.

The Heart Of Jesus Glowed, Because It Was Holy. Holy Things Glowed In General.

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.

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

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

Yelling Is A Form Of Publishing

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

So Much Better To Travel Than To Arrive.

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.

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.

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

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.

Menopause. A Pause While You Reconsider Men.

I'm With The Spirit Of Earth-day-yet-to-come. Nobody Can Really Predict The Future, All You Can Do Is Look At Trends, And That Could Change At Any Moment.

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

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.

Falling In Love, Although It Resulted In Altered Body Chemistry And Was Therefore Real, Was A Hormonally Induced Delusional State, According To Him. In Addition It Was Humiliating, Because It Put You At A Disadvantage, It Gave The Love Object Too Much Power. As For Sex Per Se, It Lacked Both Challenge And Novelty, And Was On The Whole A Deeply Imperfect Solution To The Problem Of Intergenerational Genetic Transfer.

Falling In Love

Poetry Is Where The Language Is Renewed.

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.

Kill What You Can't Save What You Can't Eat Throw Out What You Can't Throw Out Bury What You Can't Bury Give Away What You Can't Give Away You Must Carry With You, It Is Always Heavier Than You Thought.

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

Lose Your Temper And You Lose The Fight.

I Wanted To Forget The Past, But It Refused To Forget Me; It Waited For Sleep, Then Cornered Me.

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

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

If One Of The Arguments Against Eating Meat Is To Do With Cruelty And Animal Intelligence, Then Lab Meat Avoids That. There's Also The Environmental Argument For It.

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. They Wander Here And There, Slowly, Dim Lights Flickering In The Marshes At Night, Looking For Us. But They're Not Nearly Fast Enough, Not For Us, We're Way Ahead Of Them, They'll Never Catch Up. That's Why We Can Go So Fast: Our Souls Don't Weigh Us Down.

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?

What A Lost Person Needs Is A Map Of The Territory, With His Own Position Marked On It So He Can See Where He Is In Relation To Everything Else. Literature Is Not Only A Mirror; It Is Also A Map, A Geography Of The Mind. Our Literature Is One Such Map, If We Can Learn To Read It As Our Literature, As The Product Of Who And Where We Have Been. We Need Such A Map Desperately, We Need To Know About Here, Because Here Is Where We Live. For The Members Of A Country Or A Culture, Shared Knowledge Of Their Place, Their Here, Is Not A Luxury But A Necessity. Without That Knowledge We Will Not Survive.

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.

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

You Can Examine The Whole 19th Century From The Point Of View Of Who Would Have Maxed Out Their Credit Cards. Emma Bovary Would Have Maxed Hers Out. No Question. Mr. Scrooge Would Not Have. He Would Have Snipped His Up.

I Would Like To Believe This Is A Story I’m Telling. I Need To Believe It. I Must Believe It. Those Who Can Believe That Such Stories Are Only Stories Have A Better Chance. If It’s A Story I’m Telling, Then I Have Control Over The Ending. Then There Will Be An Ending, To The Story, And Real Life Will Come After It. I Can Pick Up Where I Left Off.

If You're A Woman Writer, Sometime, Somewhere, You Will Be Asked: Do You Think Of Yourself As A Writer First, Or As A Woman First? Look Out. Whoever Asks This Hates And Fears Both Writing And Women.

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

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.

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

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

We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

Happiness Is A Garden Walled With Glass: There's No Way In Or Out. In Paradise There Are No Stories, Because There Are No Journeys. It's Loss And Regret And Misery And Yearning That Drive The Story Forward, Along Its Twisted Road.

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

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

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

Always Good To Take A Look At The Long List For The Mann Booker, For The Commonwealth. It Gives You An Overview.there Is So Much Going On All Over The World That It's Impossible For One Person To Keep Up. And I Can't.

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

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

For Every Age There Is A Popular Idea About What Madness Is, What Causes It, And How A Mad Person Should Look And Behave; And It's Usually These Popular Ideas, Rather Than Those Of Medical Professionals, That Turn Up In Songs And Stories And Plays And Books.

The Truth Is Seldom Welcome, Especially At Dinner.

She Knows Herself To Be At The Mercy Of Events, And She Knows By Now That Events Have No Mercy.

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

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

Keep The Faith. Whatever That May Be. Don't Get Too Depressed Yet, Because I Have A Belief In America Being Very Diverse And Ornery, And Containing A Lot Of People Who Are Not Going To Roll Over Very Easily For A Totalitarian Dictatorship. That Is What I Think.

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.

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

We're Facing Growing Climate Change, More Floods, More Droughts, More Crisis On A Planetary Level, And The Systems We Put In Place In The Twentieth Century Are Just Not Going To Work. We've Run Out Of Stuff. Our Big Problems Are Going To Be Energy Supplies And Food Supplies. This Is Not A Right-left Issue.

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.

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

You Can Forget Who You Are If You're Alone Too Much.

You Need A Certain Amount Of Nerve To Be A Writer, An Almost Physical Nerve, The Kind You Need To Walk A Log Across A River.

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 Would Like To Be The Air That Inhabits You For A Moment Only. I Would Like To Be That Unnoticed And That Necessary.

I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.

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

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

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

And Consider: It Is Loss To Which Everything Flows, Absence In Which Everything Flowers

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 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.

The Prospect Of His Future Life Stretched Before Him Like A Sentence; Not A Prison Sentence But A Long-winded Sentence With A Lot Of Unnecessary Subordinate Clauses, As He Was Soon In The Habit Of Quipping During Happy Hour Pickup Time At The Local Campus Bars And Pubs. He Couldn’t Say He Was Looking Forward To It, This Rest-of-his-life.

Looking Forward

I Am Afraid Of Falling Into Hopeless Despair, Over My Wasted Life, And I Am Still Not Sure How It Happened.

How Easy It Is, Treachery. You Just Slide Into It.

No More Photos. Surely There Are Enough. No More Shadows Of Myself Thrown By Light Onto Pieces Of Paper, Onto Squares Of Plastic. No More Of My Eyes, Mouths, Noses, Moods, Bad Angles. No More Yawns, Teeth, Wrinkles. I Suffer From My Own Multiplicity. Two Or Three Images Would Have Been Enough, Or Four, Or Five. That Would Have Allowed For A Firm Idea: This Is She. As It Is, I'm Watery, I Ripple, From Moment To Moment I Dissolve Into My Other Selves. Turn The Page: You, Looking, Are Newly Confused. You Know Me Too Well To Know Me. Or Not Too Well: Too Much.

If You Want To Be A Writer, You Should Go Into The Largest Library You Can Find And Stand There Contemplating The Books That Have Been Written. Then You Should Ask Yourself, 'do I Really Have Anything To Add?' If You Have The Arrogance Or The Humility To Say Yes, You Will Know You Have The Vocation.

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

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.

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

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

The Young Habitually Mistake Lust For Love, They're Infested With Idealism Of All Kinds.

We Yearned For The Future. How Did We Learn It, That Talent For Insatiability?

Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.

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.

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

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

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

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

As An Artist Your First Loyalty Is To Your Art. Unless This Is The Case, You're Going To Be A Second-rate Artist. I Don't Mean There's Never Any Overlap. You Learn Things In One Area And Bring Them Into Another Area. But Giving A Speech Against Racism Is Not The Same As Writing A Novel. The Object Is Very Clear In The Fight Against Racism; You Have Reasons Why You're Opposed To It. But When You're Writing A Novel, You Don't Want The Reader To Come Out Of It Voting Yes Or No To Some Question. Life Is More Complicated Than That. Reality Simply Consists Of Different Points Of View.

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.

Genres Aren't Closed Boxes. Stuff Flows Back And Forth Across The Borders All The Time.

What Am I Living For And What Am I Dying For Are The Same Question.

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.

Romance Takes Place In The Middle Distance. Romance Is Looking In At Yourself Through A Window Clouded With Dew. Romance Means Leaving Things Out: Where Life Grunts And Shuffles, Romance Only Sighs.

Maybe The Life I Think I'm Living Is A Paranoid Delusion...sanity Is A Valuable Possession; I Hoard It The Way People Once Hoarded Money. I Save It, So I Will Have Enough, When The Time Comes.

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.

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.

Human Understanding Is Fallible, And We See Through A Glass, Darkly. Any Religion Is A Shadow Of God. But The Shadows Of God Are Not God.

If You Really Want To Stay The Same Age You Are Now Forever And Ever, She'd Be Thinking, Try Jumping Off The Roof: Death's A Sure-fire Method For Stopping Time.

Sooner Or Later, I Hate To Break It To You, You're Gonna Die, So How Do You Fill In The Space Between Here And There? It's Yours. Seize Your Space.

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.

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

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

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

Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

What You Get Is No Longer What You See.

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

Myths Can't Be Translated As They Did In Their Ancient Soil. We Can Only Find Our Own Meaning In Our Own Time.

At Last You, Will Say (maybe Without Speaking) (there Are Mountains Inside Your Skull Garden And Chaos, Ocean And Hurricane; Certain Corners Of Rooms, Portraits Of Great-grandmothers, Curtains Of A Particular Shade; Your Deserts; Your Private Dinosaurs; The First Woman) All I Need To Know: Tell Me Everything Just As It Was From The Beginning.

What’s With Her?” Says The Painter. “she’s Mad Because She’s A Woman,” Jon Says. This Is Something I Haven’t Heard For Years, Not Since High School. Once It Was A Shaming Thing To Say, And Crushing To Have It Said About You, By A Man. It Implied Oddness, Deformity, Sexual Malfunction. I Go To The Living Room Doorway. “i’m Not Mad Because I’m A Woman,” I Say. “i’m Mad Because You’re An Asshole.

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.

Men Are Afraid That Women Will Laugh At Them. Women Are Afraid That Men Will Kill Them.

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

She Who Pays The Undertaker Calls The Tune.

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.

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.

If I Pick Up A Book With Vampires On The Cover, I Want There To Be Vampires. If I Pick Up A Book With Spaceships On The Cover, I Want Spaceships. If I See One With Dragons, I Want There To Be Dragons Inside The Book. Proper Labeling. Ethical Labeling.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Her Glass Wings Are Gone.

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

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.

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.

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

Hatred Would Have Been Easier. With Hatred, I Would Have Known What To Do. Hatred Is Clear, Metallic, One-handed, Unwavering; Unlike Love.

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.

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

Anyway, Maybe There Weren't Any Solutions. Human Society, Corpses And Rubble. It Never Learned, It Made The Same Cretinous Mistakes Over And Over, Trading Short-term Gain For Long-term Pain.

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

My Own View Of Myself Was That I Was Small And Innocuous, A Marshmallow Compared To The Others. I Was A Poor Shot With A 22, For Instance, And Not Very Good With An Ax. It Took Me A Long Time To Figure Out That The Youngest In A Family Of Dragons Is Still A Dragon From The Point Of View Of Those Who Find Dragons Alarming.

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.

Like The Trains, She's Never On Time And Always Departing.

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

It's Evening, One Of Those Gray Water-color Washes, Like Liquid Dust.

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.

Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down.

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

He Needed To Exist Only In The Present, Without Guilt, Without Expectation.

What A Lost Person Needs Is A Map Of The Territory, With His Own Position Marked On It So He Can See Where He Is In Relation To Everything Else.

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.

Tell What Is Yours To Tell. Let Others Tell What Is Theirs.

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

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

Without A Trace

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.

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