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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

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
Tale
Handmaids
Studied
Puritans
Dedicated
Extensively
Tales
Throwback
Early
Perry
Society
Miller
Book
Puritan
Harvard
Handmaid

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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
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Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
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These things you did were like prayers you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
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Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
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Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
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Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.
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Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
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We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.
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I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
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The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.
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