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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
Company
Thirst
Water
Emptiness
Shimmering
Many
Islands
Much
Creates
Wrecked
Loneliness
Invents
Pursuit
Sailors
Merely
Confronted
Brain
Sailor
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Margaret Atwood
Life's not fair why should I be?
Margaret Atwood
Love's never a fair trade.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
Margaret Atwood
When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
Margaret Atwood
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Margaret Atwood
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
Margaret Atwood
A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
Margaret Atwood
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
Margaret Atwood
There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
Margaret Atwood
Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Margaret Atwood
Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
