Quote

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.

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
Like
Library
Putting
Finished
Neither
Cleric
Happy
Lit
Ever
Match
Book
Locked
Looks
Burn

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
Margaret Atwood
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
Margaret Atwood
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Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Margaret Atwood
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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
Margaret Atwood
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
Margaret Atwood
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Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.
Margaret Atwood
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
Margaret Atwood
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
Margaret Atwood
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
Margaret Atwood
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Margaret Atwood
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
Margaret Atwood