Quote

Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.

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
Thoughts
Lines
Forever
Write
Away
Writing
Even
Specific
Line

More quotes by 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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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
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Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
Margaret Atwood
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My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
Margaret Atwood
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What you get is no longer what you see.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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It's in Macbeth: The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon. I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret Atwood
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
Margaret Atwood
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
Margaret Atwood
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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
Margaret Atwood