Quote

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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
Inside
Fist
Power
Knee
Must
Fists
Time
Clue
Like
Knees
Solutions
Close
Compressed
Hold
Clues

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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
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For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
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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.
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
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The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
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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.
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I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
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You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
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I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.
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Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
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