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I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.

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
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Things
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Century
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.
Margaret Atwood
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You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Margaret Atwood
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
Margaret Atwood
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It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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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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
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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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
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Margaret Atwood
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
Margaret Atwood
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Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood
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Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood