Quote

A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Humans
Gift
Speech
Silence
Possible
Voice
Powerlessness
Used
Cherished
Together
Utter
Human
Fully

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
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.
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
Margaret Atwood
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones without them there'd be no stories.
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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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
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The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life to go places I haven't been to examine life on earth to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible to be surprised.
Margaret Atwood
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Margaret Atwood
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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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His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
Margaret Atwood
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
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Love's never a fair trade.
Margaret Atwood
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
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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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
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Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Margaret Atwood