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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
Habit
Behinds
Quaint
Behind
Refugees
Leave
Obsessive
Left
Refugee
Past
Customs
Seems
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
Margaret Atwood
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If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.
Margaret Atwood
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As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.
Margaret Atwood
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Margaret Atwood
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Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.
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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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
Margaret Atwood
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My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
Margaret Atwood
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expectation isn't the same as desire
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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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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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
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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Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret Atwood
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Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
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It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
Margaret Atwood
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He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
Margaret Atwood
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
Margaret Atwood