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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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.
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You're dead, Cordelia.' No I'm not. 'Yes you are. You're dead. Lie down.
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Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience - who knows when such a malady may strike?
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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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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
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Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
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To want is to have a weakness.
Margaret Atwood
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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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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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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
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The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood
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The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
Margaret Atwood
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
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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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