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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.

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
Faces
Prison
Voice
Stones
Selflessly
Living
Darkness
Hole
Comes
Wall
Finds
Live
Becomes
Holes
Without
Side
Stone
Self
Sides
Mirror
Face
Mirrors

More quotes by 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
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
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Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
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Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
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There is never only one, of anyone
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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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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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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
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The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
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Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
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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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He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
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