Quote

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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.
Margaret Atwood
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
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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Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
Margaret Atwood
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Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret Atwood
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't have been so scornful we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Margaret Atwood
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
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For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
Margaret Atwood
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All fat women look the same they all look 42.
Margaret Atwood
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
Margaret Atwood
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What you get is no longer what you see.
Margaret Atwood
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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
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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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood