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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

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
Optimistic
Optimism
Worse
Means
Reality
Better
Mean
Realist
Pessimism

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
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Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood
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Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
Margaret Atwood
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
Margaret Atwood
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
Margaret Atwood
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She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.
Margaret Atwood
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But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
Margaret Atwood
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The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
Margaret Atwood
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Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
Margaret Atwood
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Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Margaret Atwood
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All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
Margaret Atwood