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Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

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
Persons
Romance
Person
Changes
Book
Aren
Different
Unless
Way
Particular
Reading
Harlequin
Read
Romances
Next
Slightly

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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Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.
Margaret Atwood
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
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You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Margaret Atwood
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
Margaret Atwood
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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
Margaret Atwood
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
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Toast is me. I am toast.
Margaret Atwood
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The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
Margaret Atwood
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Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
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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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
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Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.
Margaret Atwood
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art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood