Quote

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?

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
Invents
Loneliness
Sailors
Pursuit
Confronted
Merely
Sailor
Brain
Thirst
Company
Emptiness
Water
Islands
Shimmering
Many
Wrecked
Much
Creates

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
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A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
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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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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
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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'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.
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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood
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Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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.
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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
Margaret Atwood