Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Margaret Atwood, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Margaret Atwood quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 1779 Margaret Atwood quotes for you to read and share.

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Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. -- Margaret Atwood
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The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can't see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My -- Margaret Atwood
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She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon ... -- Margaret Atwood
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A lot of people call you a feminist painter."
"What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all? -- Margaret Atwood
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then. -- Margaret Atwood
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This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards, -- Margaret Atwood
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It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I've outgrown. -- Margaret Atwood
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Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie. -- Margaret Atwood
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't think that way, Moira would say. Think that way and you'll make it happen. -- Margaret Atwood
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There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, "Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?" "You mean, commit euthanasia?" said Jimmy. "Like putting down your pet turtle?" "Just tell me," said Crake.
"I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain? -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing. -- Margaret Atwood
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I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. -- Margaret Atwood
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I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. -- Margaret Atwood
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The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised. -- Margaret Atwood
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 you tell the difference? -- Margaret Atwood
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She's smiling, a bright diminutive smile. Her eyes have come loose. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies -- Margaret Atwood
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WOMEN'S PRAYVAGANZA TODAY. The banner covers the building's former name, some dead president they shot. Below -- Margaret Atwood
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Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be. -- Margaret Atwood
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You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far? -- Margaret Atwood
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The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure. -- Margaret Atwood
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. -- Margaret Atwood
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We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard. -- Margaret Atwood
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You say, Do you / love me, do you love me / I answer you: / I stretch your arms out / one to either side, / your head slumps forward. -- Margaret Atwood
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Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people. -- Margaret Atwood
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...that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust. -- Margaret Atwood
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You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On -- Margaret Atwood
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man ... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's crowded, which pleases me. Salesladies intimidate me, I don't like to be caught shopping. -- Margaret Atwood
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The stories the children whispered to one another - while they sat weaving their endless carpets, while they could still see - was about this possible future life. It was a saying among them that only the blind are free. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like a pathway through a forest, like a carpet for royalty, it shows me the way -- Margaret Atwood
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a handful of crumpled stars -- Margaret Atwood
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Poetry is where the language is renewed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing. -- Margaret Atwood
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I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward. -- Margaret Atwood
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Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand. -- Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. ... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go. -- Margaret Atwood
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Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body. -- Margaret Atwood
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When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody
a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. -- Margaret Atwood
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The combination of presence and anonymity - confession without penance, truth without consequences - it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can mean more than one.
You can mean thousands.
I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you.
I'll pretend you can hear me.
But it's no good, because I know you can't. -- Margaret Atwood
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All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you're foaming at the mouth. -- Margaret Atwood
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she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was -- Margaret Atwood
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted. -- Margaret Atwood
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Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want anything that breaks the monotony, subverts the perceived respectable order of things. -- Margaret Atwood
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They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others. Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all used parallel strategies: you had to see where you were headed before you got there, but -- Margaret Atwood
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I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light. -- Margaret Atwood
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We have learned to see the world in gasps. -- Margaret Atwood
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Daughters of Naiads were a dime a dozen in those days; the place was crawling with them. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be of semi-divine birth. Or it never hurts immediately. -- Margaret Atwood
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This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do. -- Margaret Atwood
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People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house. -- Margaret Atwood
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they sleep, they can be startled, even there in the soothing of the heart, like waves on the shore around them. A -- Margaret Atwood
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We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.
Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why are you so interested in amoebas?"
"Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a
person is getting too complicated. -- Margaret Atwood
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Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no. -- Margaret Atwood
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Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library. -- Margaret Atwood
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Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth? -- Margaret Atwood
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. -- Margaret Atwood
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I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself? -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow. -- Margaret Atwood
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The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is it disapproval or extreme lust? Toby wonders. With some men it's hard to tell the difference. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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When the slugs begin to talk there's no time to lose. -- Margaret Atwood
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I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops. -- Margaret Atwood
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You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. -- Margaret Atwood
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My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in "B" movies. -- Margaret Atwood
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She has such guileless teeth: asexual teeth, nothing fanged about them. She used to worry about looking so symmetrical, so blond, but she's come to think of this as an asset. Her small teeth alarm no one: bland is good camouflage. - -- Margaret Atwood
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God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries. -- Margaret Atwood
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She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. -- Margaret Atwood
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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. -- Margaret Atwood
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No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. -- Margaret Atwood
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But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She did. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space. -- Margaret Atwood
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also may be untrue. One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke hope? -- Margaret Atwood
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I bet it's your mouldy socks," said Jimmy. "All the perfumes of Arabia will
not sweeten these little socks. -- Margaret Atwood
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What were these animals then?"
"They didn't have names, but I knew what they were. -- Margaret Atwood
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I thought of myself as an itinerant brain
the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view. -- Margaret Atwood
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Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. -- Margaret Atwood
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Kill what you can't save
what you can't eat throw out
what you can't throw out bury
What you can't bury give away
what you can't give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought. -- Margaret Atwood
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Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk. -- Margaret Atwood
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If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't go yet, he said, but it was never any use saying don't go yet to her. When she'd decided a thing, she was on her way. -- Margaret Atwood
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Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. -- Margaret Atwood
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If she'd foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it's grown like urban sprawl. Not -- Margaret Atwood
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If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom. -- Margaret Atwood
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When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry. -- Margaret Atwood
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That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; -- Margaret Atwood
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the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She -- Margaret Atwood
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She is dying because she said.
She is dying for the sake of the word.
It is her body, silent
and fingerless, writing this poem. -- Margaret Atwood
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All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless. -- Margaret Atwood
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What pays for all this?"
"Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the daylight we know
what's gone is gone,
but at night it's different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning; -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not just any dead man," he says out loud.
Of course not! Each one of us is unique! And every single dead person is dead in his or her very own special way! Now, who wants to share about being dead, in our own special words? Jimmy, you seem eager to talk, so why don't you begin? -- Margaret Atwood
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In ten years, you'll be on a stamp /
where anyone at all can lick you. -- Margaret Atwood
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Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. -- Margaret Atwood
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what is is, as Grandma Win used to say, and what can't be cured must be endured, and laugh and the world laughs with you but cry and you cry alone. -- Margaret Atwood
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I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now that she's the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security. -- Margaret Atwood
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The only sure camouflage was unpredictability. -- Margaret Atwood
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They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else. -- Margaret Atwood
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He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care. -- Margaret Atwood
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With you I could have
more than one skin,
a blank interior, a repertoire
of untold stories,
a fresh beginning. -- Margaret Atwood
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Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I am no authority
on sane living. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, -- Margaret Atwood
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I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. -- Margaret Atwood
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It could be old clips, it could be faked. But -- Margaret Atwood
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Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered. -- Margaret Atwood
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He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected. -- Margaret Atwood
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Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin. -- Margaret Atwood
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But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep. -- Margaret Atwood
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Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement. -- Margaret Atwood
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Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. -- Margaret Atwood
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Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn't debase herself like that. Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing? Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice. With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch you. They -- Margaret Atwood
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We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? -- Margaret Atwood
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One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.
In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? -- Margaret Atwood
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Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely. -- Margaret Atwood
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A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you. -- Margaret Atwood
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This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance. -- Margaret Atwood
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But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. -- Margaret Atwood
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But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love. -- Margaret Atwood
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Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -
The water below is as dark as the grave,
And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -
It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000221471
Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000221486
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows. -- Margaret Atwood
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I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000226194
It's better to hope than mope! -- Margaret Atwood
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I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence? -- Margaret Atwood
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I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born -- Margaret Atwood
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Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. The -- Margaret Atwood
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I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them. -- Margaret Atwood
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Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you? -- Margaret Atwood
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He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you. -- Margaret Atwood
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He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.) [From "Life Before Man," 1979) -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000236929
One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000237110
The pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can't ignore them the way you would in real life. It's like being forced to act as someone else's bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000237443
Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" "No, it isn't," says Charmaine. "Love isn't like that. With love, you can't stop yourself." She wants the helplessness, she wants ... -- Margaret Atwood
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There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude. -- Margaret Atwood
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All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place. -- Margaret Atwood
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But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away. -- Margaret Atwood
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The body is pure energy, solidifed light. -- Margaret Atwood
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It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is never only one, of anyone -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000246733
The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe the kid gravitated to Zeb for the same reason children like dinosaurs: when feeling abandoned in a world of forces beyond your control, it's comforting to have a huge, scaly beast who is your friend. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000248304
I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books. -- Margaret Atwood
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So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. -- Margaret Atwood
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. -- Margaret Atwood
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I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise? -- Margaret Atwood
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I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka. -- Margaret Atwood
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Life is warped. I'm just in sync. -- Margaret Atwood
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I can't think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time. -- Margaret Atwood
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Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out. -- Margaret Atwood
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Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000256873
Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. -- Margaret Atwood
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And Zeb's brother, Adam, was inside the flower too. That -- Margaret Atwood
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Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's like the Vatican's porn collection," Zeb told her. "Safe in our hands. -- Margaret Atwood
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The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, -- Margaret Atwood
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She'd learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb's view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own. -- Margaret Atwood
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I already told you," said Adam. "There is no need to swear."
"Sorry, it just fucking slipped out," said Zeb. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000259012
Would I laugh?"
"Matter of fact, you would," says Zeb. "Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking. -- Margaret Atwood
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And I said that Crozier did not need to call Fuck right now because we were not in trouble and did not need his help. And Toby said, That's right, he doesn't like to be summoned on trivial matters. And Zeb coughed. -- Margaret Atwood
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But love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. -- Margaret Atwood
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But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that
sensed that they were worth something. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000260536
They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. -- Margaret Atwood
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Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last -- Margaret Atwood
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How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. -- Margaret Atwood
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Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough. -- Margaret Atwood
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You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control. -- Margaret Atwood
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
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We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women. -- Margaret Atwood
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The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home. -- Margaret Atwood
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I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it ... -- Margaret Atwood
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His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it. -- Margaret Atwood
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She doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back. -- Margaret Atwood
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You will flicker in these words
and in the words of others
for a while and then go out.
Even if I send them,
you will never get these letters.
Even if I see you again,
I will never see you again. -- Margaret Atwood
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Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can't have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is better to hope than to mope! -- Margaret Atwood
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It was love, after all,
that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,
crippled their fingers,
snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.
Hate would merely have smashed them. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000283860
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones. -- Margaret Atwood
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The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. -- Margaret Atwood
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He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around. -- Margaret Atwood
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The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000286474
The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like a cat that crawls onto the page when you're trying to read. -- Margaret Atwood
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Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. -- Margaret Atwood
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Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone. -- Margaret Atwood
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What could he have done or said differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't. -- Margaret Atwood
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She'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent. -- Margaret Atwood
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Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. -- Margaret Atwood
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I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply. -- Margaret Atwood
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They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began. -- Margaret Atwood
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat. -- Margaret Atwood
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When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why were the bad people doing that? Because of Money. Money was invisible, like Fuck. They thought that Money was their helper; they thought he was a better helper than Fuck. But they were wrong about that. Money was not their helper. Money goes away just when you need it. But Fuck is very loyal. -- Margaret Atwood
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I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England. -- Margaret Atwood
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You're clear, Mr. Duke." Grins from both of them. What could Felix possibly be suspected of smuggling, a harmless old thespian like him? It's the words that should concern you, he thinks at them. That's the real danger. Words don't show up on scanners. -- Margaret Atwood
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They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane. -- Margaret Atwood
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Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning. -- Margaret Atwood
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But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives. -- Margaret Atwood
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You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you -- Margaret Atwood
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The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out? -- Margaret Atwood
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Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war! -- Margaret Atwood
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There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones. -- Margaret Atwood
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Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry. -- Margaret Atwood
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But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We -- Margaret Atwood
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A thing is valued, only if it is rare and hard to get. -- Margaret Atwood
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We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn't happened this morning, either. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art. -- Margaret Atwood
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A river shaped her,
smoothed her with sand and battered
her against the shore, and she
resisted, she is still here. -- Margaret Atwood
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I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. In -- Margaret Atwood
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The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway. -- Margaret Atwood
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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods. -- Margaret Atwood
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Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues? -- Margaret Atwood
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Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform. -- Margaret Atwood
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A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant. -- Margaret Atwood
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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending ...
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000344743
She was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry. -- Margaret Atwood
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In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it's more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them. -- Margaret Atwood
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He'd wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He'd tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he'd shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more
he was convinced
he loved her. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000347080
Gardening is not a rational act. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000347112
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000348843
She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him. -- Margaret Atwood
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The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry. -- Margaret Atwood
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I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
a rubble of tendons,
knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
how can I love you? -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000355241
A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000355736
She who weeps when the sun's in sky, Will never pile the platter high. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. She -- Margaret Atwood
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They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families. -- Margaret Atwood
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A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause. -- Margaret Atwood
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Freedom, like everything else, is relative. -- Margaret Atwood
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I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions. -- Margaret Atwood
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The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history. -- Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy. -- Margaret Atwood
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Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself? -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000371698
I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy, -- Margaret Atwood
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Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000376739
A plane of cheekbone, -- Margaret Atwood
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This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go. -- Margaret Atwood
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...I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. -- Margaret Atwood
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But now undesirable is whoever Ed says. -- Margaret Atwood
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Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, -- Margaret Atwood
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It was a question now, rather than a statement; a question with no answer. -- Margaret Atwood
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Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000380329
Why couldn't the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he's here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000380715
The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 000381243
The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later. -- Margaret Atwood
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. -- Margaret Atwood
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Econowives, they're called. These -- Margaret Atwood
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As Saint Paul says, marry or burn. -- Margaret Atwood
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But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or. -- Margaret Atwood
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful. -- Margaret Atwood
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History (that list
of ballooning wishes, flukes,
bent times, plunges and mistakes
clutched like parachutes)
is rolling itself up in your head
at one end unrolling at the other. -- Margaret Atwood
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Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining. -- Margaret Atwood
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Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable? -- Margaret Atwood
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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one and one and one and one, he said. -- Margaret Atwood
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Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. -- Margaret Atwood
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People had hoarded the lead bullets from the time before sprayguns, despite the ban on the pleebs having any kind of gun at all. Snowman -- Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. -- Margaret Atwood
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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book. -- Margaret Atwood
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit. -- Margaret Atwood
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God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind. -- Margaret Atwood
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But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think of sardines and their backbones. You can eat their backbones. The bones crumble between your teeth; one touch and they fall apart. This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone. -- Margaret Atwood
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Human beings- I've observed- are hot-wired for score keeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow. -- Margaret Atwood
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At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone. -- Margaret Atwood
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The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was. -- Margaret Atwood
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A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What -- Margaret Atwood
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To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade - this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips. -- Margaret Atwood
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I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them. -- Margaret Atwood
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The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. -- Margaret Atwood
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The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries. -- Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly. -- Margaret Atwood
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But I was the daughter of a Naiad. Behave like water, I told myself. Don't try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them. -- Margaret Atwood
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this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements; and -- Margaret Atwood
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He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. -- Margaret Atwood
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Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveler. -- Margaret Atwood
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A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown. She -- Margaret Atwood
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So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she'd married money
crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil. -- Margaret Atwood
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Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will. -- Margaret Atwood
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According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect. -- Margaret Atwood
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But it wasn't more honestly that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster. -- Margaret Atwood
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The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms. -- Margaret Atwood
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She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind's getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there's something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale. The -- Margaret Atwood
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Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. -- Margaret Atwood
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Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow. -- Margaret Atwood
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Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother? -- Margaret Atwood
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The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject. -- Margaret Atwood
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I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do. -- Margaret Atwood
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The small details of life often hide a great significance. -- Margaret Atwood
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I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance. -- Margaret Atwood
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At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth -- Margaret Atwood
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But rabbits belong to the Children of Oryx and are sacred to Oryx herself, and it would be a bad idea to offend the women. It -- Margaret Atwood
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Modesty is invisibility ... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be ... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. -- Margaret Atwood
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It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten? -- Margaret Atwood
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Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity, he says out loud. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something. -- Margaret Atwood
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How were we to know we were happy? -- Margaret Atwood
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On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates ... This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the warn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations. It's like a handprint on stone. Whoever made this was once alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. -- Margaret Atwood
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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting. -- Margaret Atwood
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The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once. -- Margaret Atwood
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God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. -- Margaret Atwood
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens. -- Margaret Atwood
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How could a person be caught that way, in an instant, by a glance, the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of an arm? But he was. -- Margaret Atwood
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What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? -- Margaret Atwood
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Real painters grunt like Marlon Brando -- Margaret Atwood
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge. -- Margaret Atwood
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It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then -- Margaret Atwood
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If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fuck that shit, I told them, I've started this and I'm going to finish it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm such a mess," he says. "Sometimes I think everyone's dead. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be. -- Margaret Atwood
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if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another's clothing as if they've just invented it, and smash their parents cars up on the way back to town. -- Margaret Atwood
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For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny. -- Margaret Atwood
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.. -- Margaret Atwood
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An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. -- Margaret Atwood
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This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don't know what I'm waiting for. What are you waiting for? they used to say. That meant Hurry up. No answer was expected. For what are you waiting is a different question, and I have no answer for that one either. -- Margaret Atwood
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories. -- Margaret Atwood
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Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. -- Margaret Atwood
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Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. -- Margaret Atwood
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How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age. -- Margaret Atwood
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If I were to meet Cordelia again, what would I tell her about myself? The truth, or whatever would make me look good?
Probably the latter. I still have that need. -- Margaret Atwood
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We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important. -- Margaret Atwood
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Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women. -- Margaret Atwood
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Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do? -- Margaret Atwood
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Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done. -- Margaret Atwood
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My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration ... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. -- Margaret Atwood
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Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times. -- Margaret Atwood
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He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can't quite remember how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a Victorian pump organ, and he hasn't figured out what to do with us. What we are worth. -- Margaret Atwood
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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way. -- Margaret Atwood
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Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. -- Margaret Atwood
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The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. -- Margaret Atwood
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His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him. -- Margaret Atwood
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As his editor put it, Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit. -- Margaret Atwood
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Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot ... they don't know what's going to happen to them. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her. Real events happen to people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her. -- Margaret Atwood
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Who should turn up but that long-lost schmuck of a Billy, and what did Charis do but rent him the other half of her duplex? It's enough to make you tear your hair out by its tiny grey roots, -- Margaret Atwood
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My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done? -- Margaret Atwood
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It's kind of shocking to hear Toby called a babe; sort of like calling God a studmuffin. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window. -- Margaret Atwood
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When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that. -- Margaret Atwood
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So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. -- Margaret Atwood
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The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out. -- Margaret Atwood
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She's not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak. "Yes, -- Margaret Atwood
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There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's only that one picture of me, standing in front of the motel door with 9 on it, long ago, a month ago. Already that child seems much younger, poorer, farther away, a shrunken, ignorant version of myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's the end of the world every day, for someone. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like to read anyway. -- Margaret Atwood
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There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help Me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space. -- Margaret Atwood
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The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church. -- Margaret Atwood
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But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained. -- Margaret Atwood
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Roamin' here, roamin' there, roamin' in my underwear, I got a sweetie covered in hair, She's all pussy everywhere -- Margaret Atwood
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It's no good thinking you're invisible if you aren't -- Margaret Atwood
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If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech. -- Margaret Atwood
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Attack, voracious
eating, and flight:
it's a sound routine
for staying alive on edges. -- Margaret Atwood
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Though it's hard to concentrate on the idea of a future. She's too immersed in the present: -- Margaret Atwood
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Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living? -- Margaret Atwood
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It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy. -- Margaret Atwood
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The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong. -- Margaret Atwood
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Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark. -- Margaret Atwood
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She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. -- Margaret Atwood
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What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge. -- Margaret Atwood
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Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins. -- Margaret Atwood
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She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible. -- Margaret Atwood
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I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still
writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. -- Margaret Atwood
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This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year's threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath ... -- Margaret Atwood
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A lie, that we come from water.
The truth is we were born
from stones, dragons, the sea's
teeth, -- Margaret Atwood
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Hope throws a smokescreen. Smoke gets in your eyes and so no one is prepared for it, but suddenly it;s there, like an out-of-control bonfire - like murder, only multiplied. It's in full spate. -- Margaret Atwood
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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own. -- Margaret Atwood
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Writing ... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are. -- Margaret Atwood
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It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. -- Margaret Atwood
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Their faces were the way women's faces are when they've been talking about you behind your back and they think you've heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right. -- Margaret Atwood
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at this distance
you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's a place
for the address. Wish you were
here. -- Margaret Atwood
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I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills. -- Margaret Atwood
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Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy. -- Margaret Atwood
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More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television ... because you are supplying just about everything ... you're a creator. -- Margaret Atwood
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Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'd felt like crying, but cry once and it's all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more. -- Margaret Atwood
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown. -- Margaret Atwood
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Tell me, Elly Kleinman, why do men feel threatened by women? -- Margaret Atwood
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Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again. -- Margaret Atwood
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The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 set loose a force in the world. -- Margaret Atwood
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To go through all that and give birth to a shredder: it wasn't a fine thought. We didn't know exactly what would happen to the babies that didn't get passed, that were declared Unbabies. But we knew they were put somewhere, quickly, away. -- Margaret Atwood
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What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. -- Margaret Atwood
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They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe; not a numbers person, but you couldn't have everything you wanted and at least he wasn't a total washout. -- Margaret Atwood
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People change, though, especially after they are dead. -- Margaret Atwood
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Only some, mind you, she said coyly, raising her index finger, waggling it at us. But they were Godless, and that can make all the difference, don't you agree? I -- Margaret Atwood
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No wires tender even as nerves
can transmit the impact of
our seasons, our catastrophes
while we are closed inside them -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out. -- Margaret Atwood
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This could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different. -- Margaret Atwood
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While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is spring, and the night wind
is moist with the smell of turned loam
and the early flowers;
the moon pours out its beauty
which you see as beauty finally,
warm and offering everything.
You have only to take. -- Margaret Atwood
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What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Hey. Everyone's different," says Derek.
"But some are more different than others," says Budge, and they all laugh. -- Margaret Atwood
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He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police. His -- Margaret Atwood
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Experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel. -- Margaret Atwood
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When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous. -- Margaret Atwood
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But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. -- Margaret Atwood
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To them I must have seemed quaint, but I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves. Unless there's blood on the floor, of course. War, pestilence, murder, any kind of ordeal or violence, that's what they respect. Blood means we were serious. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then. -- Margaret Atwood
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings. -- Margaret Atwood
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it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. -- Margaret Atwood
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The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. -- Margaret Atwood
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(...) and its crush of suited people, men and women both, all with the averted eyes and vacant faces of lifelong servants. People who see only what they're paid to see. -- Margaret Atwood
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others. -- Margaret Atwood
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I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me. -- Margaret Atwood
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They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is it real? No, it is not real. What is this not real? Not real can tell us about real. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? - -- Margaret Atwood
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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 all those things for themselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow. -- Margaret Atwood
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So much better to travel than to arrive. -- Margaret Atwood
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Yes, they know her. They touch her lips, gather her words, fly away with the message, disappear into the dark. Pass through the membrane that separates this world from the unseen world that lies just underneath it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Crankiness leads to bad outcomes, if you don't have any power to back up your crankiness. -- Margaret Atwood
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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. -- Margaret Atwood
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I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn't they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: Ren. Ren. Everyone's too sad for everything. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am not mad because I'm a woman ... I'm mad because you're an asshole. -- Margaret Atwood
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Oh Toby," says the Craker boy, "what sickness do -- Margaret Atwood
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The priest was bribed; in addition to that, we appealed to his sense of compassion. Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash, and our priest was no exception. -- Margaret Atwood
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There were the garden shears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. I should have paid attention -- Margaret Atwood
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The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he'd lost - or - sadder - had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. -- Margaret Atwood
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He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature. -- Margaret Atwood
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When a man is attacked in print, it's usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it's often for being who she is. -- Margaret Atwood
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At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire ... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year. -- Margaret Atwood
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Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool! -- Margaret Atwood
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Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ed, knows power corrupts, they'll have experienced that first-hand. They'll see how I'd be tempted to use my own power for personal reasons. They may not approve of that, but they'll buy -- Margaret Atwood
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She'd stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense. -- Margaret Atwood
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So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish. -- Margaret Atwood
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Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself. -- Margaret Atwood
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But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. -- Margaret Atwood
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Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wish I had a pig ball. -- Margaret Atwood
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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. -- Margaret Atwood
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But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge. -- Margaret Atwood
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Men and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same." Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean. -- Margaret Atwood
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers -- Margaret Atwood
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This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It's as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered. -- Margaret Atwood
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Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting. -- Margaret Atwood
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Later she will learn
about edges. Or better, find
by luck or a longer journey
the shadow of that liquid
gold place, which can be
so single and clear for her
only now, when it means danger
only to me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed - against reason - that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth. -- Margaret Atwood
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You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to thumb your nose authentically! -- Margaret Atwood
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past. -- Margaret Atwood
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Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism. -- Margaret Atwood
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That is a reconstruction, too. -- Margaret Atwood
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when I was still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidified. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation. -- Margaret Atwood
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Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first. -- Margaret Atwood
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Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions. -- Margaret Atwood
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She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted but quickly finished. -- Margaret Atwood
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She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why do I hate her so much? Why do I care, in any way, what went on in her head? -- Margaret Atwood
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Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. He would have snipped his up. -- Margaret Atwood
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It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow. -- Margaret Atwood
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Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it! -- Margaret Atwood
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Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem? -- Margaret Atwood
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You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place? -- Margaret Atwood
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She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving ... But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting. -- Margaret Atwood
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Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? -- Margaret Atwood
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My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I'm older than they are, much older. I feel ancient. -- Margaret Atwood
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One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. -- Margaret Atwood
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Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone my age is an adult, whereas I m merely in disguise. -- Margaret Atwood
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How outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise? -- Margaret Atwood
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Their youth is touching, but I know I can't be deceived by it. The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them. -- Margaret Atwood
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He says there are many ways to die and some are less pleasant than others. He says I am lucky I will never have to know things like this. "This country has no heroes," he says. "You should keep it that way. -- Margaret Atwood
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The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story. -- Margaret Atwood
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She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes. -- Margaret Atwood
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Even guppies have their opacities. -- Margaret Atwood
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Art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there. -- Margaret Atwood
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Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's amazing what denial can do. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let's get this over with or you'll be here all night. Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly. It's the least you can do. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone. -- Margaret Atwood
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All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye. -- Margaret Atwood
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The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace. -- Margaret Atwood
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Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. -- Margaret Atwood
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One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space. -- Margaret Atwood
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You don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much. (The Blind Assassin, 137). -- Margaret Atwood
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Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous. -- Margaret Atwood
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In case you're wondering, vanity never ends. -- Margaret Atwood
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I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter - if she'd lived, as I'd grown older). -- Margaret Atwood
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Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck. -- Margaret Atwood
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Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We. -- Margaret Atwood
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Where the edges are we aren't sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the center, where nothing moves. -- Margaret Atwood
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The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards. -- Margaret Atwood
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There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists. -- Margaret Atwood
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The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nobody nowhere knows what time it is. -- Margaret Atwood
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He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers. -- Margaret Atwood
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According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they're less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it? -- Margaret Atwood
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You're to love as a cock-teaser is to fucking. -- Margaret Atwood
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He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say. -- Margaret Atwood
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The butter is greasy and it will go rancid and I will smell like an old cheese; but at least it's organic, as they used to say.
To such devices we have descended. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. -- Margaret Atwood
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To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die. -- Margaret Atwood
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She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing. -- Margaret Atwood
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There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was the feet they'd do, for a first offense. They used steel cables, frayed at the ends. After -- Margaret Atwood
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Whoever cares the most will lose. -- Margaret Atwood
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Freedom to isn't the same as freedom from."
-The Handmaids Tale -- Margaret Atwood
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The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want? In -- Margaret Atwood
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And they're smiling at her, not half-smiles either, but full-on total-face smiles that are only partly fake. -- Margaret Atwood
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Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who is in love with either/or. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in? -- Margaret Atwood
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed -- Margaret Atwood
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Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these flashes of normality -- Margaret Atwood
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Here comes his hand, planing slowly across the white tablecloth like a manta ray in one of those deep-sea documentaries. It's descending onto her own hand, which she shouldn't have left so carelessly lying around on the table. -- Margaret Atwood
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Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving. -- Margaret Atwood
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Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot.
I'd say it was pretty thick already.
Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere. -- Margaret Atwood
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I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me. -- Margaret Atwood
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His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile. -- Margaret Atwood
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies. -- Margaret Atwood
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clarity of vision that could only have come from being honed on the grindstone of reality. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own. -- Margaret Atwood
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love. -- Margaret Atwood
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As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. -- Margaret Atwood
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the obvious is invisible. On -- Margaret Atwood
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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. -- Margaret Atwood
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Gender roles suck, says Swift Fox.
Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby. -- Margaret Atwood
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This is the rock garden.
In it, the stones
too are flowers -- Margaret Atwood
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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time! -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have. -- Margaret Atwood
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Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind about it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm alone with my heartbeat and my too-loud breathing. But he's right: now I can see in the dark. Such are my pictures of the dead. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it ... .By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you ... .Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. -- Margaret Atwood
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I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now there's a huge building in its place, what they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease. -- Margaret Atwood
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She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean. -- Margaret Atwood
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Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind. -- Margaret Atwood
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Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked -- Margaret Atwood
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Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. -- Margaret Atwood
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It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be. -- Margaret Atwood
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What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are ...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it. -- Margaret Atwood
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We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless. -- Margaret Atwood
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We would like to hear the story of Fuck," says Abraham Lincoln politely. -- Margaret Atwood
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Jack had stolen that from Nosferatu: the love of a pure woman had an uncanny power over the things of darkness. Maybe 1964 was the last moment when you could get away with that: try such a thing now and people would only laugh. -- Margaret Atwood
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Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace. -- Margaret Atwood
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This bug is something new though. We've got the bioprint. -- Margaret Atwood
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You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom. -- Margaret Atwood
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You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye -- Margaret Atwood
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Debt ... that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force. -- Margaret Atwood
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My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me? -- Margaret Atwood
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Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. The -- Margaret Atwood
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Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in. -- Margaret Atwood
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Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia. -- Margaret Atwood
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Canlit might not exert the fascination of - say - a venereal wart. -- Margaret Atwood
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But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave -- Margaret Atwood
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For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 'And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived in the transgression. -- Margaret Atwood
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The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now; -- Margaret Atwood
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The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region. -- Margaret Atwood
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Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards. -- Margaret Atwood
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Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot. -- Margaret Atwood
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Still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby -- Margaret Atwood
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your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection, -- Margaret Atwood
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The cells were referred to as Truffles because they were underground, rare, and valuable, because you never could tell where they might appear next, and because pigs and dogs were employed to sniff them out. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. -- Margaret Atwood
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The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day. -- Margaret Atwood
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Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. -- Margaret Atwood
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By contrast, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren't necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle? -- Margaret Atwood
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I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. -- Margaret Atwood
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Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare. -- Margaret Atwood
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Cats of all kinds will set ambushes: one frisks around in the open to distract your attention while another one slips quietly up behind. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. -- Margaret Atwood
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The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line. -- Margaret Atwood
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How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wish I was ignorant, so I didn't know how ignorant I am -- Margaret Atwood
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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better? -- Margaret Atwood
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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now that I am dead, I know everything. -- Margaret Atwood
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Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us. -- Margaret Atwood
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Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips. -- Margaret Atwood
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For him, I must remember, I am only a whim. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one. -- Margaret Atwood
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We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters. -- Margaret Atwood
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I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I don't know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don't know what else I can say to God. -- Margaret Atwood
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Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath. -- Margaret Atwood
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When I'm by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I'd identify after some thought as hunger. Then I'd go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers. -- Margaret Atwood
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We're using up the Earth. It's almost gone. You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. -- Margaret Atwood
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Canada is built on dead beavers. -- Margaret Atwood
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on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream. -- Margaret Atwood
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How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals? -- Margaret Atwood
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Speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks. -- Margaret Atwood
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Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. -- Margaret Atwood
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Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct? -- Margaret Atwood
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Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond. -- Margaret Atwood
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Jimmy suspected him of wanting to make Grandmaster, not because it meant anything but just because it was there. -- Margaret Atwood
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But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her. -- Margaret Atwood
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She would rather see for herself; she doesn't trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back. -- Margaret Atwood
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Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties. -- Margaret Atwood
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Well of course people cross genres all the time. You could have something called science-fiction-fantasy. Some galaxy far, far away and in another time with spaceships, but also dragons. And there's no rule that says you can't do that. -- Margaret Atwood
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For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sanity is a valuable possession: I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't tell such stories about romantic infatuation from the point of view of the object of the infatuation without losing the flavor of the emotion. They would just become 'who is that creep hanging around outside the balcony' stories. -- Margaret Atwood
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He is a squat, balding, flabby man, but still a man. He does not judge me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Who invented the word love? -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack. -- Margaret Atwood
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That was the original idea, but once you've got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run ... -- Margaret Atwood
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Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. -- Margaret Atwood
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They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep -- Margaret Atwood
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The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear. -- Margaret Atwood
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Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud. -- Margaret Atwood
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I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point. -- Margaret Atwood
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The times when she was away were hard for Jimmy. He worried about her, he longed for her, he resented her for not being there. -- Margaret Atwood
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I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Eyes of God run over all the earth. Because -- Margaret Atwood
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Left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs ... -- Margaret Atwood
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Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the end, we'll all become stories. -- Margaret Atwood
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Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures. -- Margaret Atwood
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The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nevertheless Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In -- Margaret Atwood
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Writing poetry is a state of free float -- Margaret Atwood
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Blank pages inspire me with terror. -- Margaret Atwood
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Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official. -- Margaret Atwood
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A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction. -- Margaret Atwood
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I exist in two places,
here and where you are. -- Margaret Atwood
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All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't interfere with false gods, you'll get the gold paint all over your hands. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's no point trying to work, Moira won't allow it, she's like a cat that crawls onto the page when you're trying to read. You -- Margaret Atwood
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You're dead, Cordelia.'
No I'm not.
'Yes you are. You're dead.
Lie down. -- Margaret Atwood
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she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through -- Margaret Atwood
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Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person. -- Margaret Atwood
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As you ramble on through life, Brother,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook. -- Margaret Atwood
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Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear," and -- Margaret Atwood
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She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes. -- Margaret Atwood
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Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. It -- Margaret Atwood
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Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he's not praying to Jesus, he's praying to you, not to your body or your face but to the space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe. Empty. -- Margaret Atwood
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She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness. -- Margaret Atwood
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That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies. -- Margaret Atwood
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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems. -- Margaret Atwood
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Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework. -- Margaret Atwood
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word. -- Margaret Atwood
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How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed. -- Margaret Atwood
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He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can't pull a trigger? -- Margaret Atwood
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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. -- Margaret Atwood
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The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice. -- Margaret Atwood
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Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou. -- Margaret Atwood
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What do you want me to do? he whispers into the empty air.
It's hard to know.
Oh Jimmy, you were so funny.
Don't let me down.
From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face.
Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go. -- Margaret Atwood
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Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be - her voice trembled - penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. She called us girls. -- Margaret Atwood
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it. -- Margaret Atwood
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friendship was always contingent. -- Margaret Atwood
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He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else. -- Margaret Atwood
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air. -- Margaret Atwood
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They say:
Speak for us (to whom?)
Some say: Avenge us (on whom?)
Some say: Take our place.
Some say: Witness
Others say (and these are women)
Be happy for us. -- Margaret Atwood
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. -- Margaret Atwood
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Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment. -- Margaret Atwood
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Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all. -- Margaret Atwood
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A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's no way of knowing in advance what will get into your work. One collects all the shiny objects that catch the fancy - a great array of them. Some of them you think are utterly useless. I have a large collection of curios of that kind, and every once in a while I need one of them. -- Margaret Atwood
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All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will. -- Margaret Atwood
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As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it ... -- Margaret Atwood
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The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. -- Margaret Atwood
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at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world -- Margaret Atwood
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Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. -- Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. -- Margaret Atwood
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Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever. -- Margaret Atwood
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The leader had a beard and was wearing a caftan that looked as if it had been sewn by elves on hash. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I'm afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I've forgotten when. -- Margaret Atwood
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History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells. -- Margaret Atwood
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People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make. -- Margaret Atwood
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Yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. -- Margaret Atwood
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God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy. -- Margaret Atwood
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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. -- Margaret Atwood
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A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being? -- Margaret Atwood
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Recently returned from Boston, where she was staying with her Aunt, to broaden her education. She has turned out a charming young woman, everything one might wish for, and displayed a courtesy and gentle kindness many would admire, and which is worth so much -- Margaret Atwood
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was sand, I was snow - written on, rewritten, smoothed over. -- Margaret Atwood
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no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on. -- Margaret Atwood
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Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships ... -- Margaret Atwood
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I want to protect myself from any further, darker memories of hers, get myself out of here gracefully before something embarrassing happens. She's balanced on the edge of an artificial hilarity that could topple over at any moment into its opposite, into tears and desperation. -- Margaret Atwood
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague, -- Margaret Atwood
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[She] smiles, too, and eats and drinks, and is happy, and outside the kitchen window the wind blows and the world shifts and crumbles and rearranges itself, and time goes on. -- Margaret Atwood
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I hunger to commit the act of touch. -- Margaret Atwood
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Snowman wakes before dawn. -- Margaret Atwood
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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it. -- Margaret Atwood
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So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud. -- Margaret Atwood
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For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt. -- Margaret Atwood
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Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. -- Margaret Atwood
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intrigues of love are unfolding as they do among the young, and as they do as well among the snails on the lettuce and the shiny green beetles that plague the kale. Murmurings, the shrug of a shoulder, the step forward, the step back. Toby -- Margaret Atwood
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As I'm standing up I hear the black van. I hear it before I see it; blended with the twilight, it appears out of its own sound like a solidification, a clotting of the night. -- Margaret Atwood
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Pearls are congealed oyster spit. -- Margaret Atwood
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I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill? -- Margaret Atwood
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A whole person could go through the wringer and come out flat, neat, completed, like a flower pressed in a book. -- Margaret Atwood
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Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is. -- Margaret Atwood
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How potent was that word. With. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now she said, "I'm up to the four-letter words." And I said, "You mean the dirty ones, like shit?" And she laughed and said, "Worse ones than that." And I said, "You mean the c-word and the f-word?" and she said, "No. Like love. -- Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. -- Margaret Atwood
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As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist. -- Margaret Atwood
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You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. -- Margaret Atwood
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And each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. -- Margaret Atwood
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That is a language for ordering
the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for
counting stacks of cans. Groceries
are all you are good for. Leave
the soul to us. Eat shit. -- Margaret Atwood
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We are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think, therefore I spam. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between. -- Margaret Atwood
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The qualities we appreciate in a character are not the same as those we would look for in a college roommate. -- Margaret Atwood
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A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water. -- Margaret Atwood
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist. -- Margaret Atwood
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All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate. -- Margaret Atwood
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But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face, -- Margaret Atwood
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Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere. -- Margaret Atwood
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I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. -- Margaret Atwood
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Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float. -- Margaret Atwood
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But nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency. -- Margaret Atwood
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He thought about hacking in and recoding the program so that when the axe came down you got the -- Margaret Atwood
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She is the witch you burned
by daylight and crept from your home

to consult & bribe at night. The love
that tortured you you blamed on her. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage. -- Margaret Atwood
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It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I'm eating a wing. It's the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can't even fly any more. I am eating lost flight. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick. -- Margaret Atwood
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(When chlorophyll chewing gum came into fashion two decades later, it was that colour.) -- Margaret Atwood
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These albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit with some plague. -- Margaret Atwood
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For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy
Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy? -- Margaret Atwood
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Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers. -- Margaret Atwood
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea. -- Margaret Atwood
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that. -- Margaret Atwood
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In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. -- Margaret Atwood
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Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Dead Hand, yeah, it was, like, seminal, but tame by today's standards. Violet, for instance, did not get her intestines ripped out. There wasn't any torture, nobody's liver got fried in a pan, there wasn't any gang rape. So what's the fun of that? -- Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats. -- Margaret Atwood
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Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual. -- Margaret Atwood
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To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked -- Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children. -- Margaret Atwood
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A fist is more than the sum of its fingers. -- Margaret Atwood
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But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life. -- Margaret Atwood
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Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. -- Margaret Atwood
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When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't buy it, but it has a price," said Oryx. "Everything has a price. -- Margaret Atwood
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There was always that shadowy twin, thin when i was fat, fat when i was thin, myself in silvery narrative ... -- Margaret Atwood
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I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth. -- Margaret Atwood
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I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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Now and again we vary the route; there's nothing against it, as long as we stay within the barriers. A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, so as long as it stays inside the maze. -- Margaret Atwood
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From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view. -- Margaret Atwood
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I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed. -- Margaret Atwood
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The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?' -- Margaret Atwood
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Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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What I think doesn't matter. Which is the only reason he can tell me things. -- Margaret Atwood
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She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out. -- Margaret Atwood
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Oh, torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade? -- Margaret Atwood
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As we walk away I know they're watching, these two men who aren't yet permitted to touch women. -- Margaret Atwood
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I supposed I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time. -- Margaret Atwood
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He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable, -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads. -- Margaret Atwood
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. -- Margaret Atwood
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All fat women look the same; they all look 42. -- Margaret Atwood
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Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished. -- Margaret Atwood
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They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice. -- Margaret Atwood
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Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering. -- Margaret Atwood
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He might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. -- Margaret Atwood
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We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something. -- Margaret Atwood
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But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. -- Margaret Atwood
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But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen ... -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001017471
All around the walls there are bookcases. They're filled with books. Books and books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can't come in here. It's an oasis of the forbidden. -- Margaret Atwood
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It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001020864
It's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space. -- Margaret Atwood
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All it takes," said Crake, "is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001028282
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up. -- Margaret Atwood
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Andrea writes for a newspaper. "This is for the Living section," she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women's Pages. It's funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and the other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001031527
And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001032677
What you don't know won't hurt you. -- Margaret Atwood
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More and more I feel like a letter - deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001038427
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program. -- Margaret Atwood
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Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way. -- Margaret Atwood
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility. -- Margaret Atwood
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On one wall there was a recent watercolour - Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera -- Margaret Atwood
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin. -- Margaret Atwood
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The crimes of others are a secret language among us. Through them we show ourselves what we might be capable of, after all. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001042665
These words are yours,
though you never said them,
you never heard them, history
breeds death but if you kill
it you kill yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001043826
I pace along the sidewalk, away from the demolished school. My old direction, I could still do it blindfolded. As always on these streets I feel disliked. -- Margaret Atwood
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[H]aving a money value was no substitute for love. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001044337
Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate ... for any social system to remain in balance. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nothing's
broken, nevertheless I'm skinless,
the gentlest touch would gut me. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001048537
Forced to chose between one irascible tyrant and another, Laura had chosen the one which was greater, and also further away. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001056092
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. -- Margaret Atwood
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Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognized that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001058850
Fear is a powerful stimulant. -- Margaret Atwood
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Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. -- Margaret Atwood
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I opened myself to your silences. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001062229
It's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. -- Margaret Atwood
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She sees where she is, she's here, by herself, she's stranded in the future. She doesn't know how to get back. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001063481
For every rule there is always an exception: this too can be depended upon. -- Margaret Atwood
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Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001067089
She doesn't have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that's keeping her away from them is lack of willpower. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001067177
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001069153
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001071645
His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they're part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001072803
She probably longed to slap my face. They can hit us, there's Scriptural precedent. But not with any implement. Only with their hands. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001073481
I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn't.
Instead it was my heart;
bleached out like meat in water. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001073777
These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001074178
We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here. -- Margaret Atwood
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What he wants is intimacy, but I can't give him that. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001075050
What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001077410
Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001081801
What is your favorite word?"
"And. It is so hopeful. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001082719
I've always wanted to know what it was like to fuck a cult figure,' the Royal Porcupine said reflectively. He was lying on his mattress, watching me as I scrubbed the dog blood off my belly with a corner of his shirt, dipped in the toilet. He didn't have a sink. 'Well, -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001084814
It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is
possibly
the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is
possibly
the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead. -- Margaret Atwood
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Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. -- Margaret Atwood
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She probably has a row of men's dicks nailed to her wall, like stuffed animal heads. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. -- Margaret Atwood
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A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale, -- Margaret Atwood
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As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. -- Margaret Atwood
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Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it -- Margaret Atwood
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There's always a black market, there's always something that can be exchanged. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think of her as a silly girl who's just fooling around at art school, too dumb to get into university, although I don't make judgments like this about the boys. -- Margaret Atwood
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The liver is evil and must be punished. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001096452
a flayed body untangled
string by string and hung
to the wall, an agonized banner
displayed for the same reason
flags are. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001097948
They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier. -- Margaret Atwood
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Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again. -- Margaret Atwood
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Gain ten pounds and they put you in Solitary. -- Margaret Atwood
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We lie together under the duvet, arms around each other. It's hard to remember what we used to fight about. The former anger is gone, and with it that edgy, jealous lust we used to have for each other. What's left is fondness, and regret. A diminuendo. -- Margaret Atwood
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You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. -- Margaret Atwood
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And still, what a risk he'd taken. The woman was like an amateur car bomb: you never knew when she would explode or who she would take down with her when she did. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist. -- Margaret Atwood
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If coffee doesn't kill me, something else will. Erie -- Margaret Atwood
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A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book. -- Margaret Atwood
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there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers -- Margaret Atwood
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Never trust a man with new clothes. -- Margaret Atwood
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain. -- Margaret Atwood
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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. -- Margaret Atwood
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All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it. I -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001107252
I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn't feel up to daughters, I didn't know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001107398
What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due to the knowledge of our history - have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs. -- Margaret Atwood
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But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001110559
What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment? -- Margaret Atwood
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oil paints...the look of licked lips. -- Margaret Atwood
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The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears. -- Margaret Atwood
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Making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors. -- Margaret Atwood
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Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose. -- Margaret Atwood
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Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one? -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001113998
We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy? -- Margaret Atwood
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This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? On -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001115568
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography - but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. -- Margaret Atwood
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The gate clicks behind me. The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups by chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. -- Margaret Atwood
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Surviving
Is the only war
We can afford -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001119931
I didn't like it when other people criticized Laura - her vagueness, her simplicity, her feckleness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001121353
Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001121766
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering? -- Margaret Atwood
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From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can't reach the word. He can't attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space. -- Margaret Atwood
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There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He'd grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out. -- Margaret Atwood
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What thumbsuckers we all are ... when it comes to mothers. -- Margaret Atwood
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Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this. -- Margaret Atwood
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When I'm with Ben I eat at regular times because he does, I eat regular things, but when I'm alone I indulge in junk food and scavenging, my old, singular ways. It's bad for me, but I need to remember what bad for me is like. -- Margaret Atwood
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You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick. -- Margaret Atwood
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Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can't go on with the story. -- Margaret Atwood
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That's the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001131946
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all. -- Margaret Atwood
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If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know. -- Margaret Atwood
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Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets. -- Margaret Atwood
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He has a vision of the top of his neck, opening up into his head like a bathroom drain. Fragments of words are swirling down it, in a grey liquid he realizes is his dissolving brain. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline. -- Margaret Atwood
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The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way. -- Margaret Atwood
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We thought we could do better.
Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better?
Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some. -- Margaret Atwood
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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. -- Margaret Atwood
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Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw. -- Margaret Atwood
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Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop, but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001145571
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays. -- Margaret Atwood
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You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm beginning to feel that I've discovered something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion. -- Margaret Atwood
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Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float. -- Margaret Atwood
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Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001154573
I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001156846
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once. -- Margaret Atwood
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I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound. -- Margaret Atwood
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The truly fearless think of themselves as normal. -- Margaret Atwood
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So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001163705
Most people prefer a past is which nothing smells. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001165612
Though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001166527
Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour. -- Margaret Atwood
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Americans don't usually have to think about Canadian-American relations, or, as they would put it, American-Canadian relations. Why think about something which you believe affects you so little? We, on the other hand, have to think about you whether we like it or not. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001166846
Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001168547
I planted him in this country
like a flag -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001169692
A Sister, dipped in blood -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001170026
I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read. -- Margaret Atwood
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Constance did not have a bun. She didn't need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Dream steals from its lair towards its prey. -- Margaret Atwood
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What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light? -- Margaret Atwood
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The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, -- Margaret Atwood
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Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor. -- Margaret Atwood
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You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control. -- Margaret Atwood
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Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with. -- Margaret Atwood
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We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. -- Margaret Atwood
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This was something he certainly had not done. I thought he might be toying, some cat-and-mouse routine, but now I think that his motives and desires weren't obvious even to him. They had not yet reached the level of words. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do -- Margaret Atwood
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women. -- Margaret Atwood
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Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary. -- Margaret Atwood
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He feels the need to hear a human voice - a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion - his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion. -- Margaret Atwood
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A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means. -- Margaret Atwood
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I felt confused, and also inadequate; whatever he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. this was the first time a man would expect more from me than i was capable of giving, but it wouldn't be the last. -- Margaret Atwood
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I thought, men who changed their names were likely to be con-men, criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married. -- Margaret Atwood
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All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001182694
Canada was built on dead beavers. -- Margaret Atwood
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A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester! -- Margaret Atwood
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well. -- Margaret Atwood
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That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us. -- Margaret Atwood
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The driver is going over it with a chamois, lovingly. This at least hasn't changed, the way men caress good cars. He's -- Margaret Atwood
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I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed. -- Margaret Atwood
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He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written. -- Margaret Atwood
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They blink and reality shivers. -- Margaret Atwood
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The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to be accomplished by it. -- Margaret Atwood
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The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand. -- Margaret Atwood
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Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sleeping in your clothes makes you tired. The clothes are crumpled, and also your body underneath them. I feel as if I've been rolled into a bundle and thrown on the floor. -- Margaret Atwood
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On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn't cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves? -- Margaret Atwood
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I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin. -- Margaret Atwood
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As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.
If it is face to face, there must be two looking. -- Margaret Atwood
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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others. -- Margaret Atwood
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He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid. -- Margaret Atwood
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When you focus on details like this - close up, really clear, totally useless - you know you're in shock -- Margaret Atwood
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Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine. -- Margaret Atwood
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In God we trust, all others pay cash. -- Margaret Atwood
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like a wall falling, we can feel it like a heavy stone moving down, pulled down inside us, we think we will burst. We grip each other's hands, we are no longer single. The -- Margaret Atwood
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. -- Margaret Atwood
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She had loved him, uselessly. -- Margaret Atwood
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A killing was exactly what he didn't want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct. -- Margaret Atwood
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The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it. -- Margaret Atwood
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The mind, he reflects, is like a house - thoughts which the owner no longer wishes to display, or those which arouse painful memories, are thrust out of sight, and consigned to attic or cellar; and in forgetting, as in the storage of broken furniture, there is surely an element of will at work. -- Margaret Atwood
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Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that? -- Margaret Atwood
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The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused. -- Margaret Atwood
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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand? There is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't even glance at the herbal teas, I go straight for the real, vile coffee. Jitter in a cup. It cheers me up to know I'll soon be so tense. -- Margaret Atwood
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You think you can get rid of things, and people too
leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back. -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't lead if no one will follow. -- Margaret Atwood
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I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. -- Margaret Atwood
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What would that be like - to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? -- Margaret Atwood
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I can see why I fell in love with him. But I don't have the energy for it now. -- Margaret Atwood
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All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large ... -- Margaret Atwood
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We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. -- Margaret Atwood
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What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he's out in the open, and surrounded by strangers. -- Margaret Atwood
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She wouldn't be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she'd be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn't like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him. Meanwhile, -- Margaret Atwood
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I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air. -- Margaret Atwood
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The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others. -- Margaret Atwood
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Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally. -- Margaret Atwood
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In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere. -- Margaret Atwood
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You are as innocent as a bathtub
full of bulleta -- Margaret Atwood
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In my dreams of this city I am always lost. -- Margaret Atwood
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He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off. -- Margaret Atwood
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I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely. -- Margaret Atwood
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The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down. -- Margaret Atwood
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Buttons were made from wood and bone, and the fancier ones from cow horns. These last two materials could be obtained for next to nothing from the several abattoirs in the vicinity, and as for the wood, it lay all round about, clogging up the land, and -- Margaret Atwood
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But we own nothing they want, so we don't qualify as terrorists. -- Margaret Atwood
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. -- Margaret Atwood
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China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there. -- Margaret Atwood
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No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle. -- Margaret Atwood
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She longs for tonight, she longs to skip the day that's just begun and plunge headlong into the night as if into a pool; a pool with the moon reflected in it. She longs to swim in liquid moonlight. -- Margaret Atwood
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The fifties was chosen for the visual and audio aspects, because that was the decade in which the most people had self-identified as being happy. Which is one of the goals here: maximum possible happiness. Who wouldn't tick that box? When -- Margaret Atwood
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As a species we're pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there'd be no more sexual torment. -- Margaret Atwood
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Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear. -- Margaret Atwood
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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. -- Margaret Atwood
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Support your libraries ... or else! -- Margaret Atwood
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings ... but there's something dead about it, something deserted. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up inside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor. -- Margaret Atwood
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In this country you can say what you like
because no one will listen to you anyway -- Margaret Atwood
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Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some. -- Margaret Atwood
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Suppose I told you about the income from body parts? Organs, bones, DNA, whatever's in demand. That's one of the big earners for this place. -- Margaret Atwood
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Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. -- Margaret Atwood
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What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's a part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's Plan. Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn't get in there yourself. That -- Margaret Atwood
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To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again. -- Margaret Atwood
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The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to. -- Margaret Atwood
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To fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's fun to be different, but not too different! -- Margaret Atwood
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Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's okay, mummy's in there lying on the floor. She'll be alright in an hour or so. -- Margaret Atwood
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We've learned to see the world in gasps. -- Margaret Atwood
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Yelling is a form of publishing -- Margaret Atwood
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The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today. -- Margaret Atwood
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Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain. -- Margaret Atwood
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A road is a process, not a location. -- Margaret Atwood
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As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove. -- Margaret Atwood
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. -- Margaret Atwood
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He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be ... -- Margaret Atwood
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Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him. -- Margaret Atwood
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The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate. -- Margaret Atwood
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they think there's an invisible entity called Fuck. A helper of Crake's in time of need. And of Jimmy's, because they heard him saying Oh fuck. I'm with them. Fuck! An invisible entity! A helper in time of need! Dead right! They -- Margaret Atwood
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Those walls and bars are there for a reason," said Crake. "Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases." "Them?" "Nature and God." "I thought you didn't believe in God," said Jimmy. "I don't believe in Nature either," said Crake. "Or not with a capital N. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkk. -- Margaret Atwood
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One detaches oneself. One describes. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way
we caught it like germs. -- Margaret Atwood
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I remember adapt," says Toby. "It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren't going to help out. -- Margaret Atwood
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In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. -- Margaret Atwood
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She has drudge written all over her. She probably stares at the ceiling, things about mopping the floor. -- Margaret Atwood
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I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed -- Margaret Atwood
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Deathwatch. That's a kind of beetle, it buries carrion. I -- Margaret Atwood
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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you do bad things for reasons you've been told are good, does it make you a bad person? -- Margaret Atwood
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May the Lord open, Janine would have replied, tonelessly, in her transparent voice, her voice of raw egg white. -- Margaret Atwood
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The question at this age is what kind of dog you will shortly resemble. She will be a beagle, Prue a terrier. Pamela will be an Afghan, or something equally unearthly. -- Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps they'll say, These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's astonishing how folks can get so worked up over something that doesn't exist. -- Margaret Atwood
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For these dances the boys send corsages, which I keep afterward and keep in my bureau drawer; squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads. -- Margaret Atwood
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It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past.
Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice? -- Margaret Atwood
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All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned. -- Margaret Atwood
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Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good. -- Margaret Atwood
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And she finds it difficult to believe - that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep ... I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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A language is everything you do. -- Margaret Atwood
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but my idea of myself and my parents' idea of me no longer belong in the same place. -- Margaret Atwood
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The argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect. -- Margaret Atwood
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The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is -- Margaret Atwood
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Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn't do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say. -- Margaret Atwood
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Did I really wear bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display, could be seen. Shameful, immodest. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of your? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain? -- Margaret Atwood
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Hell we can make for ourselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. -- Margaret Atwood
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To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What's he going to do next? -- Margaret Atwood
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While in a vintage restaurant ... the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into. -- Margaret Atwood
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Only a girl like this
can know what's happened to you.
If she were here she would
reach out her arms towards
you now, and touch you
with her absent hands
and you would feel nothing, but you would be
touched all the same. -- Margaret Atwood
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But now here they are, right in front of me. It's like seeing unicorns. I want to hear them purr. -- Margaret Atwood
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Languor is a more efficient method of control. -- Margaret Atwood
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Toast is me.
I am toast. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's hard to be afraid of a man who is sitting watching you put on hand lotion. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are no lawyers anymore, and the university is closed. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 just before that or one several technologies back. -- Margaret Atwood
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A doll is a witness who cannot die, with a doll you are never alone. On the long journey under the earth, in the boat with two prows, there were always dolls. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary? -- Margaret Atwood
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. -- Margaret Atwood
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I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree. -- Margaret Atwood
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Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because -- Margaret Atwood
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I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi. -- Margaret Atwood
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Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize. -- Margaret Atwood
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so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. -- Margaret Atwood
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The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. -- Margaret Atwood
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An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness -- Margaret Atwood
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If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around. -- Margaret Atwood
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The soft chanting envelops us like a membrane. A -- Margaret Atwood
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I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can't drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was an accident, said Cora. No such thing, said Rita. Everything is meant. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Over the years in prison, when I have been by myself, as I am a good deal of the time, I have closed my eyes and turned my head towards the sun, and I have seen red and orange that were like the brightness of those quilts. -- Margaret Atwood
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He's humanoid, he's hominid, he's an aberration, he's abominable; he'd be legendary, if there were anyone left to relate legends. -- Margaret Atwood
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They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They -- Margaret Atwood
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He wouldn't have much of a life out there, picking through garbage dumps and fighting off scavengers, but at least he'd be in charge of himself again. -- Margaret Atwood
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Darn it to heck, thinks Charmaine. -- Margaret Atwood
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice. -- Margaret Atwood
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You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won't cut you. I wouldn't like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy. -- Margaret Atwood
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The truth is I don't want him watching me while I eat. I don't want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. He -- Margaret Atwood
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Old enough ... Such a dumb concept. Old enough for what? To drink, to fuck, to know better? What fathead was in charge of making those decisions? -- Margaret Atwood
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Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago, in one of those wars we studied in high school. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who'd thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference? -- Margaret Atwood
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I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife ... as if I'm lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That's why I'm not allowed a knife. -- Margaret Atwood
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Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sanity is a valuable possession. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 get pushed over. -- Margaret Atwood
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Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology. -- Margaret Atwood
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The past no longer belongs only to those who once lived it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause. -- Margaret Atwood
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A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. -- Margaret Atwood
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What was about this that made us feel we deserved it? -- Margaret Atwood
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What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created. -- Margaret Atwood
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People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart. -- Margaret Atwood
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The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched; if i am - he'll think of something -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it. -- Margaret Atwood
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The ochre-yellow linoleum floor hasn't been scrubbed for some time; splotches of dirt bloom on it like grey pressed flowers. -- Margaret Atwood
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They should all be cheered by it, for isn't it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one: a message that cannot be cancelled out. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets. -- Margaret Atwood
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Veterans will eat there too (...). She'll wish to talk with them, but she won't because any interest from her would be sure to be misunderstood. Her body as usual would get in the way of free speech. -- Margaret Atwood
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one. -- Margaret Atwood
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The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us. -- Margaret Atwood
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She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer. -- Margaret Atwood
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The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart. -- Margaret Atwood
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He was a dork, a dink, a dong ... Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth. -- Margaret Atwood
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When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing? -- Margaret Atwood
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Not knowing makes it worse. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion ... Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people. -- Margaret Atwood
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So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means. -- Margaret Atwood
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But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was as small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive. -- Margaret Atwood
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How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? -- Margaret Atwood
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He was no longer a thing to me. That was the problem. I realized it that night, and the realization has stayed with me. It complicates. Serena -- Margaret Atwood
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Serena has begun to cry. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof. -- Margaret Atwood
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whatever else women want to see, it's not themselves; not in their worst light anyway. -- Margaret Atwood
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And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading. -- Margaret Atwood
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For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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here's the crowning, the glory, the head, purple and smeared with yoghurt, another push and it slithers out, slick with fluid and blood, into our waiting. Oh -- Margaret Atwood
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Hunger is the best sauce. -- Margaret Atwood
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Never underestimate the value of superior hair as a literary influence. -- Margaret Atwood
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expectation isn't the same as desire -- Margaret Atwood
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What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point. -- Margaret Atwood
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If I was going to do something I didn't want to do, I at least wanted to be remunerated for it. -- Margaret Atwood
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So now that we don't have different clothes," I say, "you merely have different women," This is irony, but he doesn't acknowledge it. -- Margaret Atwood
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But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him? -- Margaret Atwood
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Imagine 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, that's what the mind is for. -- Margaret Atwood
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Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A -- Margaret Atwood
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Who is this Fuck?" says Abraham Lincoln. "Why is he talking to this Fuck? That is not the name of anyone here. -- Margaret Atwood
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hippo. Like something that basks, anyway. Even her knitting is going better than -- Margaret Atwood
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There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please. -- Margaret Atwood
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard. -- Margaret Atwood
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The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. -- Margaret Atwood
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She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe acting as if she believes in such a future will help to create it, which is the kind of thing the Gardeners used to say. -- Margaret Atwood
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Petchenegs versus Byzantium, said Jimmy, one memorable day. -- Margaret Atwood
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Do you love me? That laugh of hers. What had it meant? Stupid question. Why ask? You talk too much. Or else: What is love? Or possibly: In your dreams. Then -- Margaret Atwood
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Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty. -- Margaret Atwood
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Like when you misplace your scooter keys or your phone and then they turn up and you get a rush of luckiness, as if the stars or fate or something has singled you out for a win. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you can't stop the waves, go sailing. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. -- Margaret Atwood
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There was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis. -- Margaret Atwood
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Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did. Our -- Margaret Atwood
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So she's been to college, too. I should have known. That's what we get then," he said nastily, "for educating women. They get all kinds of ridiculous ideas."
"Oh, I don't know," Marian said with a touch of sharpness, "there's some men it doesn't do much good for either. -- Margaret Atwood
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that ... that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it? -- Margaret Atwood
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The hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck. -- Margaret Atwood
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But it's love that does us in. -- Margaret Atwood
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Fear has a smell, as love does. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 central thing, the way you understood yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
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Did we make them
because we needed to love someone
and could not love each other? -- Margaret Atwood
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. -- Margaret Atwood
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Love's never a fair trade. -- Margaret Atwood
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. -- Margaret Atwood
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Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract. -- Margaret Atwood
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Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could we have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. -- Margaret Atwood
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What will it do to Jimmy's state of mind if he opens his eyes and sees three of his former beloveds bending over him like the three Fates? Demanding his everlasting love, his apologies, his blood in a cat food saucer? -- Margaret Atwood
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But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's -- Margaret Atwood
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The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds. -- Margaret Atwood
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A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon? -- Margaret Atwood
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Love is the pursuit of shadows ... -- Margaret Atwood
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I am in love with his need -- Margaret Atwood
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I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define. -- Margaret Atwood
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But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched -- Margaret Atwood
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In the moment just before giving, I am loved. -- Margaret Atwood
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Do you hunger for me, do you burn for me -- Margaret Atwood
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Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or filthy or horrible to pass her lips. A successful life for her was one that avoided things, excluded things. Such things do not happen to nice women. -- Margaret Atwood
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Guess it's the climate change, says Sam. That's what people say, the way they used to say, We've angered God. -- Margaret Atwood
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There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them. -- Margaret Atwood
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Usually I'm afraid to go so near the edge of the bridge, but this time I'm not. I don't feel anything as positive as fear. -- Margaret Atwood
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He hasn't yet taken to crapping on the carpet and destroying the furniture and whining for meals, but close. -- Margaret Atwood
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We should not expect too much from faith," he said. "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. -- Margaret Atwood
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I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.
The danger is grayout. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. - -- Margaret Atwood
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I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine. -- Margaret Atwood
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He'd meant well, or at least he hadn't meant ill. He'd never wanted to hurt anyone, not seriously, not in real space-time. Fantasies didn't count. It -- Margaret Atwood
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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back. -- Margaret Atwood
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Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. -- Margaret Atwood
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I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.' -- Margaret Atwood
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You want the air
but not the words that come with it:
breathe at your peril. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow. -- Margaret Atwood
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim. -- Margaret Atwood
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A movie about the past is not the same as the past. -- Margaret Atwood
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When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail. -- Margaret Atwood
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How much longer can I be so fucking cute? -- Margaret Atwood
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Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound. -- Margaret Atwood
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You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire. -- Margaret Atwood
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The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves; on the sidewalk my shadow crackles. -- Margaret Atwood
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How much longer can I get away
with being so fucking cute?
Not much longer. -- Margaret Atwood
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It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know. -- Margaret Atwood
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One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections. -- Margaret Atwood
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I wait, for the household to assemble. Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part.
The hold of a ship. Hollow. -- Margaret Atwood
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First, the front lines. They are not lines, really: the war seems to be going on in many places at once. Wooded -- Margaret Atwood
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I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier. -- Margaret Atwood
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it. -- Margaret Atwood
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This at least hasn't changed, the way men caress good cars. -- Margaret Atwood
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The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he'd whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark's mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth. -- Margaret Atwood
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She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almost-voided cranium. Avaunt, wanton! -- Margaret Atwood
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[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective. -- Margaret Atwood
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Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. "Wherever there's Nature, there's assholes," he said cheerfully. -- Margaret Atwood
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Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion, determined on the rightness of their choices, in everything. I could tell already that my birthday presents from Richard would always be something I didn't want. -- Margaret Atwood
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He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them. -- Margaret Atwood
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Women can't hold property anymore, she said. It's a new law. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 -- Margaret Atwood
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If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. -- Margaret Atwood
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But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be. -- Margaret Atwood
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee ... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now. -- Margaret Atwood
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A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire. -- Margaret Atwood
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But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows -- Margaret Atwood
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He throws out radiance, it must be reflected sun. Why isn't everyone staring? -- Margaret Atwood
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I find the daffodils, crisp at the edges where they've dried, limp towards the stems, use my fingers to pinch. -- Margaret Atwood
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For me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society. -- Margaret Atwood
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'? -- Margaret Atwood
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The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time. -- Margaret Atwood
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Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means. -- Margaret Atwood
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As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case. -- Margaret Atwood
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What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless. -- Margaret Atwood
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And nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way. -- Margaret Atwood
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She sits on the iron throne
She is one and three
The dark lady
the redgold lady
The blank lady
oracle
of blood, she who must be
obeyed
forever
Her glass wings are gone
She floats down the river
singing her last song -- Margaret Atwood
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I'M STARVED FOR YOU -- Margaret Atwood
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The choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator ten times over. -- Margaret Atwood
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We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. -- Margaret Atwood
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Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind. -- Margaret Atwood
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What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She -- Margaret Atwood
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History is a construct ... Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments ... We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again. -- Margaret Atwood
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With shrunken fingers
we ate our oranges and bread,
shivering in the parked car;
though we know we had never
been there before,
we knew we had been there before. -- Margaret Atwood
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On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony. -- Margaret Atwood
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God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously. -- Margaret Atwood
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None of us wanted to look like that, ever. For a moment, even though we knew what was being done to her, we despised her. Crybaby. Crybaby. Crybaby. We meant it, which is the bad part. I used to think well of myself. I didn't then. -- Margaret Atwood
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Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on. -- Margaret Atwood
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Longed for him. Got him. Shit. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone's head was going to roll it wouldn't be hers. -- Margaret Atwood
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Strange how we decorate pain.
These ribbons, for instance,
and the small hard teardrops of blood.
Who are they for?
Do we think the dead care? -- Margaret Atwood
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How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. -- Margaret Atwood
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When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth ... -- Margaret Atwood
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As a species we're doomed by hope, then? -- Margaret Atwood
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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game. -- Margaret Atwood
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's outrageous, one woman said, but without belief. What was it about this that made us feel we deserved it? When -- Margaret Atwood
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Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. It can't happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances. By -- Margaret Atwood
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Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him. -- Margaret Atwood
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These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. -- Margaret Atwood
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Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick? -- Margaret Atwood
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I had a boyfriend once who sent me
in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip
a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry. -- Margaret Atwood
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Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person. -- Margaret Atwood
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She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy. -- Margaret Atwood
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You dangle on the leash of your own longing;
your need grows teeth -- Margaret Atwood
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War is what happens when language fails. -- Margaret Atwood
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Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault. -- Margaret Atwood
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose. -- Margaret Atwood
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Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash, -- Margaret Atwood
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Why? he asked, as if he really didn't know. Maybe he didn't. It wasn't the first time he gave evidence of being truly ignorant of the real conditions under which we (women) lived. -- Margaret Atwood
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Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past. -- Margaret Atwood
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I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave. -- Margaret Atwood
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He smiles. The smile is not sinister or predatory. It's merely a smile, a formal kind of smile, friendly but a little distant, as if I'm a kitten in a window. One he's looking at but doesn't intend to buy. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures - they all have families and ancestors, just like people. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is this really your fate,
to enter poetry and become transparent? -- Margaret Atwood
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Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said, just a fluke. All we've done is return things to Nature's norm. -- Margaret Atwood
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Stretch your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust -- Margaret Atwood
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Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one. -- Margaret Atwood
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Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. -- Margaret Atwood
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The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil -- Margaret Atwood
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And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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I should have married Constance, he says. That's his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. -- Margaret Atwood
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Here is a handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope, this mouth-
ful of dirt, this poetry. -- Margaret Atwood
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I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them. -- Margaret Atwood
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If I waited for perfection ... I would never write a word. -- Margaret Atwood
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The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light. -- Margaret Atwood
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You wouldn't think it would be Toby
she was so tough and hard
but if you're drowning, a soft squashy thing is no good to hold on to. You need something more solid. -- Margaret Atwood
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Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome. -- Margaret Atwood
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Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock. -- Margaret Atwood
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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 have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever. -- Margaret Atwood
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What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet? -- Margaret Atwood
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If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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Her glass wings are gone. -- Margaret Atwood
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We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. -- Margaret Atwood
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If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening. The -- Margaret Atwood
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Powerful men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. There -- Margaret Atwood
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they have all been taught, possessiveness about our cozy corners and favorite toys isn't limited to cats and dogs. How we wish it were. Wouldn't life be simpler? -- Margaret Atwood
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Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the color of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible wings. -- Margaret Atwood
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot. -- Margaret Atwood
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As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter ... -- Margaret Atwood
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He knows this by the way the girl stumbles, and it occurs to him for the first time that by taking her with him he'll be slowed down. He'll be hampered by her ability to see. -- Margaret Atwood
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February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre. -- Margaret Atwood
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All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening -- Margaret Atwood
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With the young writers now it's F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring. -- Margaret Atwood
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He'd wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious. -- Margaret Atwood
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Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse. -- Margaret Atwood
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The bell that measures time is ringing -- Margaret Atwood
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You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. -- Margaret Atwood
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He'll find out somehow, because journeys end in lovers meeting. -- Margaret Atwood
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That's what you get for being food. -- Margaret Atwood
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The threshold of a new house is a lonely place. -- Margaret Atwood
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Last year I abstained
this year I devour
without guilt
which is also an art -- Margaret Atwood
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Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free
Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree
Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea
Which is where we would all like to be, man! -- Margaret Atwood
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Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance - we hear a capital W on Writer. -- Margaret Atwood
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You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time. -- Margaret Atwood
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I tell, therefore you are. -- Margaret Atwood
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When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting. -- Margaret Atwood
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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
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Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. -- Margaret Atwood
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You shouldn't have forged my handwriting," I said to Laura privately. "I couldn't forge Richard's. It's too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier." "Handwriting is a personal thing. It's like stealing. -- Margaret Atwood
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A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want, I don't want. How can one live with such a heart? -- Margaret Atwood
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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. -- Margaret Atwood
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She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine. -- Margaret Atwood
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I almost gasp: he's said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the dark parlor we move away from each other, slowly, as if pulled towards each other by a force, current, pulled apart also by hands equally strong. I -- Margaret Atwood
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Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much? -- Margaret Atwood
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And yes, I know it's you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it's even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it's darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: yes. It's still you. It's still you. -- Margaret Atwood
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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along. -- Margaret Atwood
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Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another. -- Margaret Atwood
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At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. -- Margaret Atwood
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Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. -- Margaret Atwood
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They look, I said. They look in all our rooms.
What for? he said.
I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said, Books, writing, black market stuff. All things we aren't supposed to have. -- Margaret Atwood
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...the beige should not wear beige. -- Margaret Atwood
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We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing -- Margaret Atwood
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Where do the words go
when we have said them? -- Margaret Atwood
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If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly. -- Margaret Atwood
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut. -- Margaret Atwood
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not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of the primal tribe, -- Margaret Atwood
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There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form. -- Margaret Atwood
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If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. -- Margaret Atwood
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A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze. -- Margaret Atwood
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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. -- Margaret Atwood
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All right, I say. I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship? -- Margaret Atwood
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Faith is only a word, embroidered. -- Margaret Atwood
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She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments -- Margaret Atwood
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On these occasions I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it were eating it would be gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. -- Margaret Atwood
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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God. -- Margaret Atwood
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Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from. -- Margaret Atwood
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I like the flowers, but know I would not go to such lengths, make such efforts, get myself dirty to produce them. -- Margaret Atwood
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A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think of her as a woman for whom every act is done for show, is acting rather than a real act. She does such things to look good, I think. She's out to make the best of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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He was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots. -- Margaret Atwood
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They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals! -- Margaret Atwood
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She said, What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know an hurt you very much. -- Margaret Atwood
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If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking. -- Margaret Atwood
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Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. -- Margaret Atwood
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How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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What is the real breath of a man - the breathing out or the breathing in? -- Margaret Atwood
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If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil. -- Margaret Atwood
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from
the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
what your teacher taught you to do in school. -- Margaret Atwood
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You aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it. -- Margaret Atwood
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My good intentions are completely lethal. -- Margaret Atwood
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There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is no fool like an educated fool... -- Margaret Atwood
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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. -- Margaret Atwood
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The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse. -- Margaret Atwood
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I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most. -- Margaret Atwood
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I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen. -- Margaret Atwood
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Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives? -- Margaret Atwood
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The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner. -- Margaret Atwood
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Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit. -- Margaret Atwood
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What's the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it's assumed you've seen, the latter to something it's assumed you haven't. Language is not always dependable either. -- Margaret Atwood
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What I have always assumed in hi to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. -- Margaret Atwood
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Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs. -- Margaret Atwood
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Spend this in remembrance of me. -- Margaret Atwood
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Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it. -- Margaret Atwood
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That way nobody feels exploited."
"Wait a minute," says Stan. "Nobody's exploited?"
"I said nobody feels exploited," says Budge. "Different thing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one
day after the other rolling on;
I move up, it's called
awake, then down into the uneasy
nights but never
forward. -- Margaret Atwood
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How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being? -- Margaret Atwood
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How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being? -- Margaret Atwood
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Nobody's heart is perfect. -- Margaret Atwood
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The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free. -- Margaret Atwood
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Your baby can double as a lawn mower. -- Margaret Atwood
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The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed. -- Margaret Atwood
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Reality simply consists of different points of view. -- Margaret Atwood
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Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown.
I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire. -- Margaret Atwood
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When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict. -- Margaret Atwood
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She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons. -- Margaret Atwood
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I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They -- Margaret Atwood
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the Waterless Flood has now rolled over our city, and indeed over the entire Planet. Most -- Margaret Atwood
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And so I step up, int the darkness within; or else the light. -- Margaret Atwood
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The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth. -- Margaret Atwood
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What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food! -- Margaret Atwood
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God is a cluster of neurons. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment. -- Margaret Atwood
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I was tired of her getting away with being so young. -- Margaret Atwood
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They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender. -- Margaret Atwood
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The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history. -- Margaret Atwood
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I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying -- Margaret Atwood
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There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared. And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped. -- Margaret Atwood
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I began to forget myself
in the middle
of sentences. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001676219
You wouldn't poison anyone!" she said. Pilar gave her a straight look. "You never know, dear," she said. "When you might have to. -- Margaret Atwood
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Wherever there's Nature, there's assholes," he -- Margaret Atwood
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Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you. -- Margaret Atwood
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Life's not fair; why should I be? -- Margaret Atwood
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Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness. -- Margaret Atwood
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His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay. -- Margaret Atwood
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Backward glances are not encouraged. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's going to be all right, I said, prayed in my head. Oh let it. Let us cross, let us across. Just this once and I'll do anything. What I thought I could do for whoever was listening that would be of the least use or even interest I'll never know. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001685777
I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001688772
Modesty is Invisibility -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001689513
If the stock market exists, so must previous lives. -- Margaret Atwood
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EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001691828
I didn't want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don't see the body, it's easier to believe nobody's dead. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001692190
Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001692777
Our fragments made us. -- Margaret Atwood
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Powerful but insecure men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001694869
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001694928
I am not your justification for existence. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001695454
A word after a word after a word is power. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001695939
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning. -- Margaret Atwood
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Translation was never possible. Instead there was always only conquest, the influx of the language of hard nouns, the language of metal, the language of either/or, the one language that has eaten all the others. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001696693
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups. -- Margaret Atwood
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He shouldn't have let himself be caged in here, walled off from freedom. But what does freedom mean any more? And who had caged him and walled him off? He'd done it himself. So many small choices. -- Margaret Atwood
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They put the picture in the window when they have something, take it away when they don't. Sign language. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001699457
Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001700306
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. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001700380
My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001700685
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn't last long in nature. They're too conspicuous. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends. -- Margaret Atwood
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Soothing to the eye, the eyes, the Eyes, for that's who this show is for. We're -- Margaret Atwood
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. -- Margaret Atwood
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And he couldn't stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood. -- Margaret Atwood
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I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is. -- Margaret Atwood
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A few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues. -- Margaret Atwood
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At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was a form of compliment, she felt, since it made her the focus of his attention. -- Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood Quotes : pic 001709951
Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem? -- Margaret Atwood
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And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that. -- Margaret Atwood
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I looked at it, and thought I was seeing adult life. -- Margaret Atwood
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe they'll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don't fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that's what they'll do. -- Margaret Atwood
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Never pray for justice, because you might get some. -- Margaret Atwood
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The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Not real can tell us about real. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time. -- Margaret Atwood
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer. -- Margaret Atwood
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We lived in the gaps between the stories. From -- Margaret Atwood
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Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex -- Margaret Atwood
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Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far? -- Margaret Atwood
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In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar. -- Margaret Atwood
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I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry. -- Margaret Atwood
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They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves. -- Margaret Atwood
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Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole. -- Margaret Atwood
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the euphoria of bee handling, like an altitude high or the rapture of the deep. It -- Margaret Atwood
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As for you, she'd say to me, you're just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me. But -- Margaret Atwood
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went.
No, why?
You moved.
Just don't move. -- Margaret Atwood
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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one. -- Margaret Atwood
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Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important. -- Margaret Atwood
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Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly. -- Margaret Atwood
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The past is a closed door. -- Margaret Atwood
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Death is a beautiful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare; or is that Victory? I can't remember. They -- Margaret Atwood
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Temptation comes next. At the Center, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say. Maybe -- Margaret Atwood
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It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot. One -- Margaret Atwood
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Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. -- Margaret Atwood
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wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell. -- Margaret Atwood
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Her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus. -- Margaret Atwood
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You want your decisions taken away from you so you won't be responsible for your own actions? -- Margaret Atwood
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It made him feel invisible - not that he wanted to feel anything else. -- Margaret Atwood
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It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. -- Margaret Atwood
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She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes! -- Margaret Atwood
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They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked? I -- Margaret Atwood
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. -- Margaret Atwood
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Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful. -- Margaret Atwood
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As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness
a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens. -- Margaret Atwood
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The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later. -- Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think. -- Margaret Atwood
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by dropping down from above. Why is war so much like a practical joke? she -- Margaret Atwood
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This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone. Lying -- Margaret Atwood
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But I had the taste of rabbit in my mouth. It felt like I'd eaten a nosebleed. That -- Margaret Atwood
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What has having a baby got to do with getting a job at an art gallery? You're always thinking in terms of either/or. The thing is wholeness. -- Margaret Atwood
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves
our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. -- Margaret Atwood
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All she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, -- Margaret Atwood
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Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them? -- Margaret Atwood
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You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking. -- Margaret Atwood
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I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it. -- Margaret Atwood
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I don't think they'll ever replace the living and breathing," says Gary. "They said that about e-books," says Kevin. "You can't stop progress. -- Margaret Atwood
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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread. -- Margaret Atwood
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How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen. Rented -- Margaret Atwood
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Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say. -- Margaret Atwood
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To want is to have a weakness. -- Margaret Atwood
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No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer. -- Margaret Atwood
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The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm dreaming that I am awake. -- Margaret Atwood
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When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all. -- Margaret Atwood
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I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman. -- Margaret Atwood
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We understand more than we know. -- Margaret Atwood
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That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This -- Margaret Atwood
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Visualize your strongest desire, the Gardeners used to say, and it will manifest; which doesn't always work, or not as intended. Her -- Margaret Atwood
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Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. -- Margaret Atwood
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To want is to have a weakness. It's this weakness, whatever it is, that entices me. It's like a small crack in a wall, before now impenetrable. -- Margaret Atwood
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. . . they lurk passively, like vampire sheep -- Margaret Atwood
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What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much. -- Margaret Atwood
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After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others. -- Margaret Atwood
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She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same. -- Margaret Atwood
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. -- Margaret Atwood
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God be with you is not an unmixed blessing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country. -- Margaret Atwood
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Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words. -- Margaret Atwood
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The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? -- Margaret Atwood
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Pain marks you, but too deep to see. -- Margaret Atwood
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One of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring. -- Margaret Atwood
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Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience? -- Margaret Atwood
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What possesses them, these young girls with a talent for self-immolation? -- Margaret Atwood
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I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red. -- Margaret Atwood
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And it's not the real Elvis you need to resemble, it's the imitation Elvises. Not hard to look like one of them. -- Margaret Atwood
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The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance. -- Margaret Atwood
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Boys don't smell the same as girls. They have a pungent, leathery, underneath smell, like old rope, like damp dogs. -- Margaret Atwood
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There is a Do this or a Do that with God, but not any Because. -- Margaret Atwood
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From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end. -- Margaret Atwood
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A universe that includes you
cant be all bad, but
does it? at this distance
you're a mirage, -- Margaret Atwood
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Or I would walk through Queen's Park, quickly and with purpose. If too slowly, a man was bound to appear. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. -- Margaret Atwood
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..there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf. -- Margaret Atwood
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All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it. -- Margaret Atwood
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Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance. -- Margaret Atwood
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I can't believe in my own sadness, I can't take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears. -- Margaret Atwood
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It is remarkable, I have since thought, how once a man has a few coins, no matter how he came by them, he thinks right away that he is entitled to them, and to whatever they can buy, and fancies himself cock of the walk. -- Margaret Atwood
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Amanda says if there's something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time. I -- Margaret Atwood
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What you get is no longer what you see. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's worse than I thought it would be, and also better.
Some days I think I'm crazy to have done this; other times that it's the sanest move I've made in years. -- Margaret Atwood
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You couldn't leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. -- Margaret Atwood
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I've read in the National Geographic about deepsea diving and why you have to wear a thick metal suit or the invisible pressure of the heavy undersea water will crush you like mud in a fist, until you implode. This is the word: implode. It has a dull final sound to it, like a lead door closing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Madness is only an amplification of what you already are. -- Margaret Atwood
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She who pays the undertaker calls the tune. -- Margaret Atwood
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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. -- Margaret Atwood
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'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names. -- Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't know it, but this touching she does is not only compassionate, but possessive. -- Margaret Atwood
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In Heaven I want to be the age I am. -- Margaret Atwood
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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up. -- Margaret Atwood
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Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got. -- Margaret Atwood
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Why do men feel threatened by women? -- Margaret Atwood
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He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger. -- Margaret Atwood
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You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense. -- Margaret Atwood
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There was a pot of boiling rage on a private stove behind their closed curtains: -- Margaret Atwood
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I am not being wasted. Why do I want? -- Margaret Atwood
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All of this was understood, and if not condoned, at least pardoned. -- Margaret Atwood
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I should throw my gold watch
into the ocean and become
timeless. -- Margaret Atwood
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely. -- Margaret Atwood
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If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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Some people write letters, in the library. -- Margaret Atwood
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They were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. -- Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe. -- Margaret Atwood
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When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been. -- Margaret Atwood
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There are some things that do not fare well in high definition. -- Margaret Atwood
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After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is. -- Margaret Atwood
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Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow. Cora -- Margaret Atwood
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Congratulations on a good outcome! We've all been rooting for you. Charmaine wonders who's been doing the rooting, because she hasn't noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes. -- Margaret Atwood
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Disguise is easier when you're young. -- Margaret Atwood
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men. -- Margaret Atwood
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An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it. The -- Margaret Atwood
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Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results. -- Margaret Atwood
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Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing. -- Margaret Atwood
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Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see. -- Margaret Atwood
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I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change. -- Margaret Atwood
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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. -- Margaret Atwood
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Inside the peach, there is a stone. -- Margaret Atwood
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But now it's officially a sitting room, because that's what is done in it, by some. For others there's standing room only. -- Margaret Atwood
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I make no profit / like the sun
I burn and burn -- Margaret Atwood
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None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. -- Margaret Atwood
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We fight in whispers or well out of the way, because if we're caught we will both be punished. For this reason we don't tell on each other. We know from experience that the satisfactions of betrayal are scarcely worth it. -- Margaret Atwood
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The proper study of Mankind is Everything. -- Margaret Atwood
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In front of us, to the right, is the store where we order dresses. Some people call them habits, a good word for them. Habits are hard to break. -- Margaret Atwood
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The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure. -- Margaret Atwood
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The internet is 95 percent porn and spam -- Margaret Atwood
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Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again. -- Margaret Atwood
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I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn -- Margaret Atwood
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He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. -- Margaret Atwood
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None of this happens, of course. Or it does happen, but not so you would notice. It happens in another dimension of space. -- Margaret Atwood
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most. -- Margaret Atwood
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I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then. -- Margaret Atwood
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Lose your temper and you lose the fight. -- Margaret Atwood
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The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. -- Margaret Atwood
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However, men and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same. -- Margaret Atwood
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Bad hearts have their uses; even I can see that. -- Margaret Atwood
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These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too. -- Margaret Atwood
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fuck" is a spirit called upon for guidance in times of need. -- Margaret Atwood
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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die? -- Margaret Atwood
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Was he invading? Was he in my room?
I called it mine. -- Margaret Atwood
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At least he hadn't completely blown it: she wasn't angry with him. That was the main thing. What -- Margaret Atwood
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He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This is one of the most bizarre things that's happened to me, ever. Context is all. -- Margaret Atwood
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His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he'd have used matches. -- Margaret Atwood
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But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this. -- Margaret Atwood
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It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell. -- Margaret Atwood
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She gives him an LED smile: light, but no heat. -- Margaret Atwood
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Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I -- Margaret Atwood
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People always forget about prophecies unless they come true. -- Margaret Atwood
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We understand more than we know. The -- Margaret Atwood
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(...) cause after a request like that there's always a next time, wether you say yes or no. -- Margaret Atwood
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Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human fetus. They -- Margaret Atwood
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Are there stars? he asks her. She nods. -- Margaret Atwood
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In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. - Sufi proverb -- Margaret Atwood
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Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.
Nothing safer than dead, said Rita, angrily. -- Margaret Atwood
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Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting. -- Margaret Atwood
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It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly. -- Margaret Atwood
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Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine! -- Margaret Atwood
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My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing. -- Margaret Atwood
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You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say. -- Margaret Atwood
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Hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. -- Margaret Atwood
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The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them must be. -- Margaret Atwood
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. -- Margaret Atwood
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Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people. -- Margaret Atwood
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Not me," said Jimmy, trying to joke. "I don't have a price." Wrong, as usual. -- Margaret Atwood
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Of late the three of them wouldn't even let him dry the dishes because he'd dropped too many of them on the floor. He'd done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, -- Margaret Atwood
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Potential has a shelf life. -- Margaret Atwood
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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am. -- Margaret Atwood
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Chewing with my mind full. Stuff comes out my mouth." And -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm bad at picking heroes. -- Margaret Atwood
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant. -- Margaret Atwood
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I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman. -- Margaret Atwood
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How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact. -- Margaret Atwood
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Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls. -- Margaret Atwood
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Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together. -- Margaret Atwood
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Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. -- Margaret Atwood
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What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not. -- Margaret Atwood
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But mostly she likes the fact that there's a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught. -- Margaret Atwood
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. -- Margaret Atwood
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By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been afraid to pronounce them. -- Margaret Atwood
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One of the hardest things was knowing that these other people were risking their lives for you when they didn't have to. -- Margaret Atwood