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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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The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough?
Margaret Atwood
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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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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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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. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?
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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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, it's the universal protest against Time.
Margaret Atwood
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She would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour — navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours — less like something she'd chosen to put on than like something she'd been locked up in.
Margaret Atwood
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In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.
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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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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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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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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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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A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
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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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
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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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 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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Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.
Margaret Atwood
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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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