Quote

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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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
Home
Watching
Dystopia
Even
Constitution
Rioting
Would
Streets
Suspended
People
Wasn
Stayed
Television
Finger
Enemy
Temporary
Looking
Direction
Night
Fingers

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
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Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
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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.
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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I am not your justification for existence.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
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