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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

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
Make
Icons
Canada
Idiot
Allowed
Unless
Also
Balloon
Country
Balloons
Really
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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.
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?
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
Margaret Atwood
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The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Margaret Atwood
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.
Margaret Atwood
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
Margaret Atwood
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
Margaret Atwood
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Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
Margaret Atwood
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What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Margaret Atwood
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You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Margaret Atwood
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
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we lived in the gaps between the stories
Margaret Atwood
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You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
Margaret Atwood
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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
Margaret Atwood