7 Margaret Atwood Quotes on Identity

Margaret Atwood quotes on identity

1. I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

5. Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

13. I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.

17. To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.

28. Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.

36. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

40. My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. 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. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said 'writer,' not 'poet;' I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently - I had repressed it - and said she had been simply astounded. 'Why?,' I said. 'Because I wanted to be a writer?' 'No,' she said. 'Because you had the guts to say it out loud.'