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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
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And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers
Margaret Atwood
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I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
Margaret Atwood
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Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
Margaret Atwood
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I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Margaret Atwood
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
Margaret Atwood
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The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.
Margaret Atwood
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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
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Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.
Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter.
Margaret Atwood
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But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
Margaret Atwood
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Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.
Margaret Atwood
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at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.
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