Quote

Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

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
Different
Instead
Dwelling
Things
Already
Meal
Felt
Concentrate
Next
Meals
Unearned
Able
Injury
Injuries
Might
Hadn
Prone
Self
Pity
Drift
Done
Income
Encourages

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Life's not fair why should I be?
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If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, How's the little lady today! you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.
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Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
Margaret Atwood
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What you get is no longer what you see.
Margaret Atwood
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We've learned to see the world in gasps.
Margaret Atwood
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
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All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Margaret Atwood
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The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
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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But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.
Margaret Atwood
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So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
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In theory I can do almost anything certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.
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