Quote

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.

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
Human
Secret
Sight
Accustomed
Donor
Humans
Pain
Line
Damage
Sordid
Never
Often
Behinds
Instance
Overwhelm
Men
Nature
Behind
Red
Clinic
Anything
Told
Cross
Physicality
Reason
Blood
Crosses
Donors
Find
Stand
Depth
Faint
Might
Lines
Painful
Depths

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
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The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
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Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.
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I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling.
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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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More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
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Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
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I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
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I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
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... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
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I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
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Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.
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Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
Margaret Atwood