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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Smell
Garden
Spring
Equinox
Nature
Springtime
Ends
Gardener
Like
Gardening
Dirt
Seasons

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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.
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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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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
Margaret Atwood
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Margaret Atwood
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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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I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Margaret Atwood
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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 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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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
Margaret Atwood
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The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.
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. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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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... 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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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