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friendship was always contingent.

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
Contingent
Friendship
Always

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
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What you get is no longer what you see.
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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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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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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.
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I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
Margaret Atwood
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I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
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I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
Margaret Atwood
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood
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It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Margaret Atwood
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Margaret Atwood
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
Margaret Atwood
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
Margaret Atwood
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Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
Margaret Atwood
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­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
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