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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
Take
Captured
Must
Held
Time
Kept
Writers
Upon
Stories
Past
Immobile
Care
Descend
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
Margaret Atwood
Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
Margaret Atwood
When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
Margaret Atwood
Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Margaret Atwood
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
Margaret Atwood
Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
What you get is no longer what you see.
Margaret Atwood
... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Margaret Atwood
I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
Margaret Atwood
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
Margaret Atwood
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
Margaret Atwood
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
Margaret Atwood
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
Margaret Atwood
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
Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, This is Black Lives Matter. It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.
Margaret Atwood
I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
