Quote

If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, How's the little lady today! you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.

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
Little
Lady
Friendly
Stranger
Says
Probably
American
Taps
Littles
Cringe
Today
Ass

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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
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and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
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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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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
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I am not your justification for existence.
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
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The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor.
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
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Blank pages inspire me with terror.
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For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.
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My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
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The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
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I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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Love's never a fair trade.
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