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He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

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
Present
Future
Doesn
Vertigo
Past
Regain
Looks
Sheer
Clearly
Destroy
Worse

More quotes by 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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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.
Margaret Atwood
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Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
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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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
Margaret Atwood
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Margaret Atwood
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
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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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
Margaret Atwood
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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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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
Margaret Atwood
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
Margaret Atwood
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When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
Margaret Atwood
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The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
Margaret Atwood
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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
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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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
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Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.
Margaret Atwood
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A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood