Quote

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.

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
Need
Ability
Anarchy
Enough
Freedom
Torn
Needs
Individual
Chaos
Always
War
Actions
Social
Structure
Action
Beings
Human
Choose
Humans
Least
Avoided

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Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
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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 lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
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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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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.
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I am not your justification for existence.
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In my dreams of this city I am always lost.
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I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
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You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
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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.
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The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
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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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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
Margaret Atwood
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There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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