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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Back
Undeclared
Never
Battled
Invisibility
Fought
Flight
Defense
Longer
Secret

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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
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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.
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Blank pages inspire me with terror.
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Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
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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.
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
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Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
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Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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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.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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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.
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
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