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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

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
Opening
Door
Beginning
Completely
Doors
Novel
Space
Onto
Every
Unknown

More quotes by 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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and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Margaret Atwood
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The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
Margaret Atwood
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It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
Margaret Atwood
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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood
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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
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A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
Margaret Atwood
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
Margaret Atwood
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
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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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
Margaret Atwood
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A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood