Quote

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

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
Existence
Suit
Scarecrow
Wish
Mothers
Deficiencies
Mother
Wishes
Diagrams
Make
Suits
Fabrication
Stick
Deficiency
Sticks
Dolls
Hunger
Pins
Deny
Crude
Hungers

More quotes by 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!
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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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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oil paints...the look of licked lips.
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
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Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
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Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
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The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
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Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
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Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
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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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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
Margaret Atwood
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
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