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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
Margaret Atwood
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It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.
Margaret Atwood
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So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Margaret Atwood
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There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
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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... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
Margaret Atwood
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As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Margaret Atwood
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Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Margaret Atwood
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I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey it seemed unfair to me, even then.
Margaret Atwood
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Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.
Margaret Atwood
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I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
Margaret Atwood
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
Margaret Atwood
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A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Margaret Atwood
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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't have been so scornful we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Margaret Atwood
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood