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The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

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
Seldom
Welcome
Dinner
Especially
Truth

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
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I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.
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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
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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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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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
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and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Margaret Atwood
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This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future the place of caught breath.
Margaret Atwood
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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
Margaret Atwood
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So much better to travel than to arrive.
Margaret Atwood
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It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
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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Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Margaret Atwood
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There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.
Margaret Atwood