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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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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
Scornful
Shouldn
Compassion
Takes
Young
Work

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
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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.
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
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Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
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.
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Margaret Atwood
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I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.
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The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.
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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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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
Margaret Atwood
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood
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The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter.
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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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
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Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?
Margaret Atwood
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
Margaret Atwood
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He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Margaret Atwood