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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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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
People
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Cause
Deals
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood
I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
Margaret Atwood
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
Margaret Atwood
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
Margaret Atwood
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
Margaret Atwood
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Margaret Atwood
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
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
I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
Margaret Atwood
She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.
Margaret Atwood
He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
Margaret Atwood
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
Margaret Atwood
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood
Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
Margaret Atwood
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
Margaret Atwood
He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
Margaret Atwood
