Quote

He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Duty
Feeling
Strangely
Tender
Words
Rescue
Feelings
Abandoned
Children
Developed
Woods
Towards

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In theory I can do almost anything certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.
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She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.
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You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
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I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.
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Even in the tragedies, [William] 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.
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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... 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.
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
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I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.
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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.
Margaret Atwood