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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

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
Even
Control
Always
Head
Story
Tell
Else
Someone
Stories
Ending
Must
Telling

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
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Love's never a fair trade.
Margaret Atwood
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He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Margaret Atwood
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Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
Margaret Atwood
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
Margaret Atwood
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I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.
Margaret Atwood
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
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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.
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
Margaret Atwood
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret Atwood
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This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
Margaret Atwood
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
Margaret Atwood
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood