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Margaret Atwood

182 quotesNovelist · Born Nov 18, 1939 · Canadian · Female

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Atwood is also the inventor, and developer, of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. She is the Co-Founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. (formerly Unotchit Inc.), a company that she started in 2004 to develop, produce and distribute the LongPen technology. She holds various patents related to the LongPen technologies. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetr

All Love (21)Life (14)Change (12)Stories (9)Pain (9)Desire (7)God (6)Confusion (5)Weakness (5)Truth (4)Poetry (4)strength (4)Freedom (4)Children (4)Perception (4)

From “Bluebeard's Egg: Stories”

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Nature Awe Of Nature Being A Child positive Spring

From “Interlunar”

What use is moonlight? I reach into it, fingers open, and my hand is silvered and blessed, and comes back to me holding nothing.

Moon Temptation Poetry Disappointment Empty

From “Good Bones”

Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.

Poetry Love Desire Adventure

Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.

From “The Blind Assassin”

Tell me where it hurts, she’d say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.

Pain expression

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

admiration

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

Intense feeling Absence Curiosity situations comparison

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

Salvation Love Imagination Hope

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

Feelings emotions Intensity Sensitivity

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

Happiness Joy Pain Loss Grieving

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Mind Perception Obsessiveness Obsessing

From “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love…

premonition Foresight Love

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same.

Mind Thoughts Intense feelings emotions

It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.

Paradise Hell Torture Being Stuck Love

When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

Pain Sadness self

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Change Identity Self-Concept

'Should' is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

Regret Perception Mistakes Alternate Universes

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Beginnings Change Endings

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

Secrets Keeping Secrets

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands…

Truth Farewells Goodbyes Saying Goodbye Returning

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