Quote

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.

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
Like
Stars
Pins
White
Remote
Look
Sharp
Looks
Steel
Must
Alcohol
Enamel
Going
Smell
Piercing
Think
Fingers
Nighttime
Thinking
Cold
Smells

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.
Margaret Atwood
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My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
Margaret Atwood
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Margaret Atwood
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
Margaret Atwood
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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.
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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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
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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.
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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
Margaret Atwood
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The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched if i am - he'll think of something
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Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?
Margaret Atwood
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Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.
Margaret Atwood
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The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
Margaret Atwood
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
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Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.
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Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.
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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
Margaret Atwood