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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
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
Things
Dismal
Cave
Caves
Laugh
Completely
Laughing
Really
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood
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
You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
Margaret Atwood
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
Margaret Atwood
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
There is no fool like an educated fool.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood
Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret Atwood
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret Atwood
And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
Margaret Atwood
So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
Margaret Atwood
It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
Margaret Atwood
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
Margaret Atwood
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
Margaret Atwood