Quote

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

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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
Come
Paid
Loans
Based
Loan
Civilization
Insult
Conditions
Gifts
Part
Revenge
Revenges
Back
Condition
Exchanges
Human
Debt
Trades
Humans
Trade
Insults

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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expectation isn't the same as desire
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Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.
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Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
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Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
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The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
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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.
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
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You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
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The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
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A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
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Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
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The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
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