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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
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
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Every
Utopia
People
Literary
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Sticks
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
Margaret Atwood
He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
Margaret Atwood
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
Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience - who knows when such a malady may strike?
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.
Margaret Atwood
If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret Atwood
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
Margaret Atwood
Where do the words go when we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
Margaret Atwood
In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
Margaret Atwood
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Margaret Atwood
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.
Margaret Atwood
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
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
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
Margaret Atwood
Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
Margaret Atwood
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Margaret Atwood
Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!
Margaret Atwood
