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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.

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
Behave
Happen
Didn
Happens
Become
Fascists
Believe
Fascism
People
Facing
Monsters

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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
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If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
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Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.
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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
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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.
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Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.
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A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
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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.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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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.
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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
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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.
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
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