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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

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
Brother
Either
Literature
Gone
Science
Way
Good
English

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
Margaret Atwood
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Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
Margaret Atwood
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
Margaret Atwood
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
Margaret Atwood
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
Margaret Atwood
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There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
Margaret Atwood
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
Margaret Atwood
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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
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Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
Margaret Atwood
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We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
Margaret Atwood
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All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
Margaret Atwood
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
Margaret Atwood
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret Atwood
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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
Margaret Atwood
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
Margaret Atwood
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As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret Atwood
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Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood