Margaret Atwood Quotes
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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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I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.
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He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
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A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.
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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
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The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?
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Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
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Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.
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He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.
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If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror.
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I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.
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Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.
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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
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You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.
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When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others.
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I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
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An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
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I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, 'What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?', and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, 'Is there hope?'
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Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare.
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I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
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I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
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She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?
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I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
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'Better never means better for everyone.' The Handmaid's Tale (TV Series 2017)