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Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
Margaret Atwood
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Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.
Margaret Atwood
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Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.
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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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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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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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
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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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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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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I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
Margaret Atwood
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You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.
Margaret Atwood
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Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.
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.
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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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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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Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. 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
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. 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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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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The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends
that will make them feel better. History cannot be
erased, although we can soothe ourselves by
speculating about it.
Margaret Atwood
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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
Margaret Atwood
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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 backwards in time and exist in two places at once.
Margaret Atwood
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Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.
Margaret Atwood
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He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.
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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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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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)
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