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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
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What you get is no longer what you see.
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Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
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When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
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Powerlessness and silence go together.
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Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering unlike love.
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
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This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future the place of caught breath.
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I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
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I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
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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.
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... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
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