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

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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
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... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
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expectation isn't the same as desire
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
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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.
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
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Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
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Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say.
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
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I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
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The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
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If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
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