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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up amongst biologists.
Margaret Atwood
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If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
Margaret Atwood
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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood
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Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Margaret Atwood
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Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
Margaret Atwood
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It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
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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People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
Margaret Atwood
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't have been so scornful we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Margaret Atwood
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
Margaret Atwood
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Margaret Atwood
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
Margaret Atwood
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
Margaret Atwood