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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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
Something
Determines
Determine
Completely
Look
Looks
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
Margaret Atwood
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood
Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
Margaret Atwood
I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
Margaret Atwood
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
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.
Margaret Atwood
Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths the air fills with feathers.
Margaret Atwood
...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.
Margaret Atwood
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
Margaret Atwood
When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
Margaret Atwood
The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
Margaret Atwood
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
