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Margaret Atwood Quotes
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After I wrote Handmaid's Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren't there any protests. And I said, You don't understand totalitarianism. A real totalitarianism doesn't fool around with protests in the streets.
Margaret Atwood
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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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A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
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
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.
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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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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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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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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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 facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
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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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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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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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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When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.
Margaret Atwood
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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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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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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You wonder about her crime. She was condemned
to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from
the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself
more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.
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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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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A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.
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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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
Margaret Atwood
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
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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