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I am not your justification for existence.

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
Justification
Existence

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
Margaret Atwood
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There is never only one, of anyone
Margaret Atwood
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The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched if i am - he'll think of something
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
Margaret Atwood
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Margaret Atwood
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Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
Margaret Atwood
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So much better to travel than to arrive.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.
Margaret Atwood
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Margaret Atwood
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Her glass wings are gone.
Margaret Atwood
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The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.
Margaret Atwood
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
Margaret Atwood
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Margaret Atwood