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I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

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
Born
Six
Quebec
Right
Later
Marie
General
Toronto
Months
Hospital
Football
Hospitals
Grew
Cups
Game
Gray
Games
Bush
Ottawa

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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
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You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
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As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.
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She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
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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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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
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So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
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If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.
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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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In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.
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When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
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Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.
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The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
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Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
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