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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
Persons
Amoebas
Person
Shapeless
Flexible
Immortal
Complicated
Interested
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More quotes by 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!
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
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His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.
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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
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He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry I think I uncover the problems.
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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
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Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
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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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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
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Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.
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