Margaret Atwood Quotes
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Freedom, like everything else, is relative.
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You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.
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I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.
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Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset.
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These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
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Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
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She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.
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After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, 'You don’t understand totalitarianism.' A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets.
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War is what happens when language fails.
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You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
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The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
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There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.
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Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. 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.
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He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts.
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For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
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The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.
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In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.
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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.
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The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.
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To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
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In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
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Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.
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I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.