Quote

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

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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
Safe
Quaint
Past
Vintage
Life
Restaurant
Restaurants
Shape
Distance
Shapes
Decor
Later
Squeezed

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I grew up amongst biologists.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
Margaret Atwood
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
Margaret Atwood
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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
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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Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
Margaret Atwood
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Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.
Margaret Atwood
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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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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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Why aren't we investing more in alternate tech? The Saudi Arabians are, Scottish Power is. I was just there. Could it be that we're counting on the oil going on forever and ever and ever and us having all of it and getting very rich?
Margaret Atwood
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
Margaret Atwood
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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Margaret Atwood