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I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.
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
Person
Ever
Longfellow
Mets
Read
Persons
More quotes by 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
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
Margaret Atwood
You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret Atwood
Her glass wings are gone.
Margaret Atwood
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
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
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
Margaret Atwood
If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
Margaret Atwood
We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.
Margaret Atwood
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
Margaret Atwood
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.
Margaret Atwood
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
Margaret Atwood
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
Margaret Atwood
Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.
Margaret Atwood
Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Margaret Atwood