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The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.
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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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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All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
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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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care whether you are male, female, or an elephant.
Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
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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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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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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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Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.
Margaret Atwood
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Powerlessness and silence go together. We... should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.
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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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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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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From the kitchen she hears laughter; and the clatter of dishes. Charis is setting out the food, Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories.
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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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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I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
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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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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A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
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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This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone—other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands—but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
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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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Margaret Atwood
Creative Commons
Born:
November 18, 1939
(age 84)
Bio:
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C.
Known for:
The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Alias Grace (1996)
MaddAddam (2013)
Most used words:
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