10 Margaret Atwood Quotes on Culture

Margaret Atwood quotes on culture

41. 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. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death - poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.

49. 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.

51. However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions - of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots - and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets - who went into a frenzy while prophesying - many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour - if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic - perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.

53. When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

68. If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, 'How's the little lady today!' you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.

70. If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

75. Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

80. The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head.

81. The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'.

82. The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.