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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

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I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
Margaret Atwood
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Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, This is Black Lives Matter. It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
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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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
Margaret Atwood
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Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.
Margaret Atwood
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Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths the air fills with feathers.
Margaret Atwood
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
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I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] it almost made me want to be a film-maker!
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
Margaret Atwood
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Margaret Atwood
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Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
Margaret Atwood
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
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and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Margaret Atwood
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
Margaret Atwood
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood