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I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey it seemed unfair to me, even then.

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
Ends
Hanged
School
Odyssey
Even
Horrified
Maids
Unfair
Seemed
Fate
High

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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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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.
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
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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.
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The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
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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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Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
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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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What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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