I've been involved in activities with other people who were put in jail. We were protesting the closing of the prison farm program at the prison I used in a previous book, Alias Grace. Some of us also put up money in order to save the heirloom herd of cows there. So I own half a cow!

I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

It's in Macbeth: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon." I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

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

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.