How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to...

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could...

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to...

It isn’t chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

A language is everything you do.

I won’t fatten them in cages, though. I won’t ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won’t change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won’t drain out their life’s blood. They can do...

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

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there’s always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology...

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to

In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.

I shouldn’t have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration...

Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands.

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 fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.

…the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they’d covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Falling in love… how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the...

I wish I didn’t have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I’m not impressed, I’m disgusted…You wanted to make damn good and sure I’d never be able to turn over in...

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We...

Canada was built on dead beavers.

If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one...

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The male frog, in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog,...

What thumbsuckers we all are…when it comes to mothers.

There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in...

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do...

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did...

But remember that forgiveness, too, is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn’t now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better – a better person. They believed it could uplift...

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your...

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have....

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it’s the latter, so I sign up.

It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.

She wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t want to put her neuron power into long sentences.