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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

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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
Didn
Flags
Someone
Ice
Thought
Snow
Look
Disaster
Canadians
Looks
National
Leafs
Good
Harder
Fond
Especially
Leaf
Water
Flag

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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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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So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
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Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
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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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Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
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I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Margaret Atwood
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Margaret Atwood
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Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!
Margaret Atwood
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It's in Macbeth: The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon. I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!
Margaret Atwood
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Powerlessness and silence go together.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
Margaret Atwood
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My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?
Margaret Atwood