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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: 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
Work
Scornful
Shouldn
Compassion
Takes
Young

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
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Life's not fair why should I be?
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
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Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.
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So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
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Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.
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Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
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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.
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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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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
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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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Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
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Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
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