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Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

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
Getting
Persons
Amoebas
Person
Shapeless
Flexible
Immortal
Complicated
Interested
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Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
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Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
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The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
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But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
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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.
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
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History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
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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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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
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So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
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A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
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