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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.

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
Writing
Write
Assume
Excusing
Even
Left
Assuming
Erasing
Long
Hands
Otherwise
Scroll
Way
Truth
Fingers
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Never
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Ink
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Emerging
Right
Hand
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Must
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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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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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What you get is no longer what you see.
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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 doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
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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.
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As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.
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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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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
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I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
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What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
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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.
Margaret Atwood