Quote

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

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
Live
Cast
Never
Bright
Casts
Farewells
Absence
Shattering
Flesh
Farewell
Worse
Returns
Shadow
Solid
Return
Surely

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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.
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
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Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.
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It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
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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.
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Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
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He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
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Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
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The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.
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It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
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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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His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
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He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
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I am not your justification for existence.
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
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