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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Toast is me. I am toast.
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Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
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Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering unlike love.
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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
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To want is to have a weakness.
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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
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The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling.
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I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
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For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
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We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
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