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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

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
Unintentionally
Disturbs
Intentional
Hurts
Hurt
Learn
Someone

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
Margaret Atwood
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...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
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We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.
Margaret Atwood
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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Margaret Atwood
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I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.
Margaret Atwood
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
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Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
Margaret Atwood
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
Margaret Atwood
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When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
Margaret Atwood
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
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Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
Margaret Atwood
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
Margaret Atwood
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
Margaret Atwood
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You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood