Quote

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future the place of caught breath.

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
Past
Breaths
Stills
Caught
Solstice
Still
Sun
Cusp
Years
Becomes
Unlocking
Year
Threshold
Point
Lets
Future
Midnight
Place
Breath

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
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The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
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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.
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
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Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.
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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.
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If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
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I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
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Powerlessness and silence go together.
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expectation isn't the same as desire
Margaret Atwood
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood