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

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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
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If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
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Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.
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We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
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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.
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
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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?
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
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I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
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I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
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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.
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Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.
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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.
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