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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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
Older
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December
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
Margaret Atwood
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
Margaret Atwood
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
Margaret Atwood
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
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
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Margaret Atwood
... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
Margaret Atwood
Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.
Margaret Atwood
There is never only one, of anyone
Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
Margaret Atwood
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
Margaret Atwood
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
Life's not fair why should I be?
Margaret Atwood
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
It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
Margaret Atwood
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Margaret Atwood
Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
Margaret Atwood