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Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

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
Every
Numbers
People
Within
Light
Dystopia
Problem
Specialized
Littles
Utopia
Little
Lights
Right
Number
Going
Huge

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
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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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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry I think I uncover the problems.
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Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
Margaret Atwood
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood
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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Margaret Atwood
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
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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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I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
Margaret Atwood
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
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?
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
Margaret Atwood
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Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
Margaret Atwood