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The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

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
Humans
Limited
Nothing
Notes
Play
Sorry
Dear
Played
Keyboard
Moral
Keyboards
Friends
Hasn
Human
Lower

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.
Margaret Atwood
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Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
Margaret Atwood
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So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
Margaret Atwood
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Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Margaret Atwood
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They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.
Margaret Atwood
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Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
Margaret Atwood
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expectation isn't the same as desire
Margaret Atwood
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Margaret Atwood
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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?
Margaret Atwood
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Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
Margaret Atwood