Quote

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

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
Self
Mirrors
Prison
Live
Without

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
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Love's never a fair trade.
Margaret Atwood
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The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.
Margaret Atwood
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Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.
Margaret Atwood
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I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.
Margaret Atwood
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Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret Atwood
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The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?
Margaret Atwood
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
Margaret Atwood
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A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.
Margaret Atwood
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
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Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
Margaret Atwood
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
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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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
Margaret Atwood
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I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
Margaret Atwood
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood