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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
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
Leaving
Elbow
Inside
Elbows
Scattered
Pulled
Yellow
Soft
Seeds
Tongue
Parachutes
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
Margaret Atwood
Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
Margaret Atwood
Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
Margaret Atwood
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
Margaret Atwood
I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
Margaret Atwood
Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
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
These things you did were like prayers you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
Margaret Atwood
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
Margaret Atwood
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.
Margaret Atwood
While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
Margaret Atwood
The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.
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
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Margaret Atwood
The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
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