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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

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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
Open
Truth
Seems
Find
Verge
Going
Door
Always
Poet
Poetry
Doors

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Where do the words go when we have said them?
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She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
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For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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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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A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
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Blank pages inspire me with terror.
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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.
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Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
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When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
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Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
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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.
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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
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I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
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