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I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

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
Human
Machine
Humans
Possibly
Much
Machines
Good
Hundred
Would
Deal
Sewing
Deals
Asylums
Suffering
Relieve
Certain
Lunatic

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
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Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
Margaret Atwood
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Blank pages inspire me with terror.
Margaret Atwood
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Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Margaret Atwood
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As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Margaret Atwood
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
Margaret Atwood
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
Margaret Atwood
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Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, This is Black Lives Matter. It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.
Margaret Atwood
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A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Margaret Atwood
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If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
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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?
Margaret Atwood