If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
Margaret AtwoodEXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?
Margaret AtwoodImagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, thatโs what the mind is for.
Margaret Atwoodat last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret AtwoodThe newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
Margaret Atwood