Quote

The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.

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
Tell
Cannot
Hard
Hearted
Feel
Deaf
Feels
Blind
Writing
Reader
Heart
Hear
Make
Words

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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friendship was always contingent.
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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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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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.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Margaret Atwood
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My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
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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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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
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You shouldn't do that, said Laura. You could set yourself on fire.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
Margaret Atwood
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps they were looking for passion perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
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Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
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I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.
Margaret Atwood