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In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.

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
Stories
Journeys
Paradise
Journey

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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we lived in the gaps between the stories
Margaret Atwood
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
Margaret Atwood
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
Margaret Atwood
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The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
Margaret Atwood
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Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
Margaret Atwood
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The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
Margaret Atwood
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
Margaret Atwood
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood
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Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't have been so scornful we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Margaret Atwood
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Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
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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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.
Margaret Atwood
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Margaret Atwood
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Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.
Margaret Atwood
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Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
Margaret Atwood
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For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.
Margaret Atwood
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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
Margaret Atwood
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I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
Margaret Atwood