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What you get is no longer what you see.

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
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
Margaret Atwood
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The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor.
Margaret Atwood
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I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
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
Margaret Atwood
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It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.
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!
Margaret Atwood
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
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I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
Margaret Atwood
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You shouldn't do that, said Laura. You could set yourself on fire.
Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter.
Margaret Atwood
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
Margaret Atwood
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Margaret Atwood
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Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!
Margaret Atwood
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This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
Margaret Atwood