Quote

Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

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
Happens
Famine
Real
Bread
Different
Piece
Mind
Room
Things
Pieces
Rooms
Happen
Imagine

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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
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She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
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I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.
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Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
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Perhaps they were looking for passion perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
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Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
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When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
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...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.
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What you get is no longer what you see.
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
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You're dead, Cordelia.' No I'm not. 'Yes you are. You're dead. Lie down.
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In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
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