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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 “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Disposable Time Childhood Growing Up Change

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.

Truth Writing Creativity

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…

Future Clarity Depression Understanding Big Picture

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Youth Growing Up Time

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel…. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them…

Wolf Independence Wild Literature

From “The Handmaid's Tale”

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Beautiful Past Memories

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Pain

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Jealousy Theory

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Ignorance Ignoring

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Faith strength Inspirational

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between stories.

Freedom Stories

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Journalists Writers Authors Freedom Stories

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Pain remember forget

They only show us victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? Possibly he's an actor.

Bad News Defeats Propaganda

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

News Unreal

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and…

Social Change Political Injustice Being Silent

Careless. I was careless in those rooms. I could lift the telephone and food would appear on a tray, food I had chosen. Food that was bad for me, no doubt, and drink too. There were bibles in the dresser drawers put there by some charitable society, though probably no one read them very much.

hotel room hotels Decadence

Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she'd put the bomb in her own car for sympathy. That's how hot things were getting.

Unrest Politics

These men, we've been told, are like war criminals. It's no excuse that what they did was legal at the time, their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples for the rest. Though this is hardly needed, no woman in her right mind these days would seek to…

Abortion Criminals Pro-Choice Pro-Life

'Modesty is invisibility,' said Aunt Lydia. 'Never forget it. To be seen, to be SEEN, is to be,' her voice trembled, 'Penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.'

Girls Women feminism Modesty

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