Quote

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time all must go from here to there all must descend to where the stories are kept all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

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
Must
Held
Time
Kept
Writers
Upon
Stories
Past
Immobile
Care
Descend
Take
Captured

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
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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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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
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The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?
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In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones without them there'd be no stories.
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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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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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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.
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
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We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
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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.
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So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
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Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.
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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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