Quotation Time

Today, a few choice quotes from Margaret Atwood, because I can:

From Negotiating With the Dead
-"Normal youths sneered at the artsies, at least at the male ones, and sometimes threw them into snow banks. Girls of an artistic bent were assumed to be more sexually available than the cashmere twin-set ones, but also mouthier, crazier, meaner, and subject to tantrums: getting involved with one was therefore more trouble than the sex might be worth."
-"By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward--the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth--and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing."
-"The written word is so much like evidence--like something that can be used against you later."
-"An art of any kind is a discipline; not only a craft--that too--but a discipline in the religious sense, in which the vigil of waiting, the creation of a receptive spiritual emptiness, and the denial of self all play their part."
-"Should the god of the artist be Apollo the Classicist, with his beautiful formality, or Mercury, the mischief-maker, trickster, and thief?"
-"It isn't the writer who decides whether or not his work is relevant."
-"Its [the chapter's] hypothesis is that not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality."
-"I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry."
-"A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave: like the Underworld, you can't live there."


-Patrick