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This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

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
Emotion
Emotions
Maybe
Somehow
Anyone
Lack
Picturing
Problem
Response
Reciprocate
Good
Criticism
Criticisms
Life
Picture
Responses
People
Gift
Demands
Demand
Reactions

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.
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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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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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
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You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Margaret Atwood
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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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Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
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...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.
Margaret Atwood
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
Margaret Atwood
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
Margaret Atwood
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Margaret Atwood