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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

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
Paint
Begin
Knew
Even

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Margaret Atwood
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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
Margaret Atwood
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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?
Margaret Atwood
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More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.
Margaret Atwood
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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expectation isn't the same as desire
Margaret Atwood
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
Margaret Atwood
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Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.
Margaret Atwood
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All writers must go from now to once a upon a time all must go from here to there all must descend to where the stories are kept all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
Margaret Atwood
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Her glass wings are gone.
Margaret Atwood