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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

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
Ability
Evil
Good
Abilities
Required
Extreme
Similar
Extremes

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Margaret Atwood
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
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The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
Margaret Atwood
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Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
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I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.
Margaret Atwood
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I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
Margaret Atwood
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The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
Margaret Atwood
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I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
Margaret Atwood
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
Margaret Atwood
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... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
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 ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.
Margaret Atwood
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Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.
Margaret Atwood
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I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] it almost made me want to be a film-maker!
Margaret Atwood