Quote

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

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
Without
Selfishness
Children
Onto
Would
Shoulders
Saving
Protection
Grace
Levity
Others
Loaded
Past
Crushed

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I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
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The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
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You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
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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.
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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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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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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.
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A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.
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Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
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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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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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poetry is where the language is renewed.
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
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Support your libraries... or else!
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
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