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I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

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
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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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friendship was always contingent.
Margaret Atwood
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A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
Margaret Atwood
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I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
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 grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
Margaret Atwood
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It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
Margaret Atwood
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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
Margaret Atwood
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
Margaret Atwood
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
Margaret Atwood
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
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Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
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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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
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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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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My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
Margaret Atwood