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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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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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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
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The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
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Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
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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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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor.
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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
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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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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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Toast is me. I am toast.
Margaret Atwood
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The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
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Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.
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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.
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