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I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

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
Behinds
Quaint
Behind
Refugees
Leave
Obsessive
Left
Refugee
Past
Customs
Seems
Habits
Like
Forced
Habit

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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
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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.
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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.
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I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
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When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
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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.
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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.
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The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
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I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
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We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.
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Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.
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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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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
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Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths the air fills with feathers.
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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
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I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
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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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