Quote

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

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
Explain
Complicated
Goodness
Evil
Difficult
Hard
Sometimes
Scoffing
Misunderstand

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
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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.
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A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
Margaret Atwood
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When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
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The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
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But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.
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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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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
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Toast is me. I am toast.
Margaret Atwood
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Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience - who knows when such a malady may strike?
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood
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As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.
Margaret Atwood
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
Margaret Atwood
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
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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.
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Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret Atwood