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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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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
Music
Dust
Human
Defined
Humans
Structure
Civilization
Structures
Meaning
Imaginative
Words
Ashes
Left
Admit
Art
Images

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
Margaret Atwood
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
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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Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
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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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.
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friendship was always contingent.
Margaret Atwood
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
Margaret Atwood
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You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
Margaret Atwood
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret Atwood
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry I think I uncover the problems.
Margaret Atwood
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Margaret Atwood
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Margaret Atwood
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
Margaret Atwood
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Margaret Atwood
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Margaret Atwood
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... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Margaret Atwood