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Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

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
Think
Thinking
Wars
Ones
Happen
Winning
Start
War
Happens

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones without them there'd be no stories.
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
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I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey it seemed unfair to me, even then.
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A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
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Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Margaret Atwood
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
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We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Margaret Atwood
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
Margaret Atwood
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
Margaret Atwood
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It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
Margaret Atwood
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Margaret Atwood
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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
Margaret Atwood
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I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] it almost made me want to be a film-maker!
Margaret Atwood
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.
Margaret Atwood