Quote

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

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
Arms
Listen
Dead
Around
Disembodied
Body
Blamed
Without
Deserted
Real
Heartbeat
Something
Wanting

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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.
Margaret Atwood
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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poetry is where the language is renewed.
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Love's never a fair trade.
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When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.
Margaret Atwood
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
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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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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.
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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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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
Margaret Atwood
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Margaret Atwood
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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood