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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.
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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.
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
Margaret Atwood
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
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The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
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Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
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He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
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Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
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EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?
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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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