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Don't let the bastards grind you down.

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
Latin
Handmaids
Porridge
Bastards
Grind
Graduation

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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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
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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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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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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Margaret Atwood
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The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
Margaret Atwood
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
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I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
Margaret Atwood
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at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret Atwood
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Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?
Margaret Atwood
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
Margaret Atwood
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It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
Margaret Atwood
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
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Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
Margaret Atwood