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

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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
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But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
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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?
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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
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If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
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I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
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If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, How's the little lady today! you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.
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I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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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.
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Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.
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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.
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As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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