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

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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
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Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
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All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
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­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
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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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My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
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It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
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The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.
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To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.
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I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.
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If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.
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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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Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
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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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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
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