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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

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
Saying
Something
Like
Shuts
Final
Finals
Married
Dead

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Margaret Atwood
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
Margaret Atwood
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You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood
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Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
Margaret Atwood
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I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
Margaret Atwood
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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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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that could change at any moment.
Margaret Atwood
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Margaret Atwood
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The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.
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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Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
Margaret Atwood
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History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
Margaret Atwood
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Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.
Margaret Atwood
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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
Margaret Atwood
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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
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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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood