I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
MARGARET ATWOODBetter never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
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The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
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Immortality,’ said Crake, ‘ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be.
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I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation’s mighty seed – For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
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A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
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The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
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I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
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Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
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It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
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I’m from the generation that had the boys’ door and the girls’ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
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The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
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I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.
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I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
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Canada was built on dead beavers.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
MARGARET ATWOOD