Quote

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

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
People
Especially
Smells
History
Recall
Past
Recalls
Nothing
Prefer
Real
Sell
Thing
Sells
Never
Smell
Would
Clean
Winsome

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If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
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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.
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
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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.
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As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
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If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
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Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?
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