The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
Interpretation
Not everyone has engaged with classic or great literature, despite the common belief that many have.
Margaret Atwood's quote highlights the misconception that a large number of people have read and appreciated classic literature. This suggests that while some works are considered great, the reality is that many individuals may not have had the opportunity or interest to engage with such texts, reflecting wider truths about access to literature and culture.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of reading, one might refer to Atwood's quote to emphasize that not everyone has read the classics.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.
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