Quote

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

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
First
Pretend
Thing
Spent
Years
Rest
Getting
Stuff
Three
School
Firsts
Marking

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
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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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­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
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.
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
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The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life to go places I haven't been to examine life on earth to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible to be surprised.
Margaret Atwood
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
Margaret Atwood
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In theory I can do almost anything certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.
Margaret Atwood
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
Margaret Atwood
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
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If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
Margaret Atwood
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She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Margaret Atwood
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A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood