Poetry Quote by Margaret Atwood — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are:”

“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.”

“A truth should exist,”

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”

“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”

“A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.”

“Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,”

“there's no clarity.”

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

“I am not a slow learner”

“Still round the corner there may wait”