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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: 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
Explain
Complicated
Goodness
Evil
Difficult
Hard
Sometimes
Scoffing
Misunderstand

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
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Faith is only a word, embroidered.
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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.
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Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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Love's never a fair trade.
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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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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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
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History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
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I feel like the word shatter.
Margaret Atwood
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Margaret Atwood
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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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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
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.
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