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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

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
Plans
Human
Humans
Come
Going
Storyteller
Never
Plan
Kill
Built

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
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.
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Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.
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You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
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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
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched if i am - he'll think of something
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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Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
Margaret Atwood
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Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
Margaret Atwood
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Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Margaret Atwood
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
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?
Margaret Atwood
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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
Margaret Atwood
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Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
Margaret Atwood
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
Margaret Atwood