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My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

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
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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.
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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.
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We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.
Margaret Atwood
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It's very hard for students not to be in debt unless they've got big scholarships or rich parents. And it's called investing in your future, but like any investment it's risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you don't invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So it's a real dilemma.
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
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There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
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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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The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
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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.
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry I think I uncover the problems.
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
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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.
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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?
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Margaret Atwood
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
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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