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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.

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
Problem
Solution
Uncover
Good
Scientific
Crystal
Think
Solve
Genesis
Thinking
Solutions
Crystals
Usually
Formation
Dipping
Poetry
Thread
Cluster
Problems
Metaphor
Clusters
Words
Poem
Induce

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
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I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
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We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.
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Fear has a smell, as love does.
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
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To want is to have a weakness.
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
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When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
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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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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood