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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

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
Activist
Equally
Nature
Thinking
Alternate
Utopian
Suspicious

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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You're dead, Cordelia.' No I'm not. 'Yes you are. You're dead. Lie down.
Margaret Atwood
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Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
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About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
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We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.
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Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.
Margaret Atwood
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I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter.
Margaret Atwood
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
Margaret Atwood
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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Margaret Atwood
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As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.
Margaret Atwood
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.
Margaret Atwood
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He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
Margaret Atwood
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Margaret Atwood
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Margaret Atwood
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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
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My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
Margaret Atwood