Quote

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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
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We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
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You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Margaret Atwood
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He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Margaret Atwood
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You shouldn't do that, said Laura. You could set yourself on fire.
Margaret Atwood
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I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.
Margaret Atwood
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
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I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
Margaret Atwood
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
Margaret Atwood
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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
Margaret Atwood
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
Margaret Atwood