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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

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
Living
Dying
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More quotes by 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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You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.
Margaret Atwood
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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
Margaret Atwood
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What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Margaret Atwood
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When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.
Margaret Atwood
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at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret Atwood
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Margaret Atwood
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
Margaret Atwood
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
Margaret Atwood
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
Margaret Atwood
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
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I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
Margaret Atwood
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Margaret Atwood
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret Atwood
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Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.
Margaret Atwood
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No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
Margaret Atwood