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
Complicated
Goodness
Evil
Difficult
Hard
Sometimes
Scoffing
Misunderstand
Explain

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I am not your justification for existence.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
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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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
Margaret Atwood
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Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
Margaret Atwood
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I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.
Margaret Atwood
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If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, How's the little lady today! you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life to go places I haven't been to examine life on earth to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible to be surprised.
Margaret Atwood
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The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet' we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
Margaret Atwood
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Margaret Atwood
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When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
Margaret Atwood
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
Margaret Atwood
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Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
Margaret Atwood
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I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
Margaret Atwood
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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
Margaret Atwood
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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood