Quote

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.

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
Home
Dusk
Without
Knocking
Matter
Cry
Children
Soon
Much
Called
Always
Child
Comes
Death
Warned

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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
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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.
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
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So much better to travel than to arrive.
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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
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The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
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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.
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
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Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
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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.
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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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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.
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