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

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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
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We've learned to see the world in gasps.
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This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
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I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.
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Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
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There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.
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A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.
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Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
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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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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
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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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