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If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

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
Ever
Happen
Dare
Everything
Morning
Actions
Foresight
Going
Anyone
Stones
Ruined
Never
Knowledge
Consequence
Doomed
Love
Action
Laugh
Advance
Next
Drink
Consequences
Happens
Laughing
Stone
Women
Knew
Bed

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
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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'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
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As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
Margaret Atwood
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet' we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
Margaret Atwood
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Toast is me. I am toast.
Margaret Atwood
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The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood