Quote

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.

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
Poetry
Consists
Along
Destroying
Willed
Immediately
Precipice
Nature
Realized
Trance
Would
Dignity
Woke
Life
Ignorance
Switch
Poet
Sciences
Walking
Threatening

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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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I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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Snowman wakes before dawn.
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Toast is me. I am toast.
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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'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that could change at any moment.
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Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
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Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
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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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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
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What you get is no longer what you see.
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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
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The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
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he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
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