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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
Thinking
Alternate
Utopian
Suspicious
Activist
Equally
Nature

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
Margaret Atwood
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
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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When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps they were looking for passion perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
Margaret Atwood
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Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
Margaret Atwood
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
Margaret Atwood
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
Margaret Atwood
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Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths the air fills with feathers.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Margaret Atwood
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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
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.
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
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expectation isn't the same as desire
Margaret Atwood
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
Margaret Atwood
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
Margaret Atwood
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What you get is no longer what you see.
Margaret Atwood
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You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.
Margaret Atwood