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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

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
Shows
Character
Book
Without
Anxieties
Anxiety
Totally
Boring
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet' we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
Margaret Atwood
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Margaret Atwood
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So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
Margaret Atwood
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
Margaret Atwood
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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Margaret Atwood
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
Margaret Atwood
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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
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These things you did were like prayers you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
Margaret Atwood
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Margaret Atwood
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at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
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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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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It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
Margaret Atwood
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
Margaret Atwood
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You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.
Margaret Atwood
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Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Margaret Atwood