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“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Men #Laughing
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“Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Stories #Reactions #Loud
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“I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Race #People #Realizing
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“Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Reading #Different #Pieces
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“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Jealousy #Jealous #Thinking
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“We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Believe #People #Monsters
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“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Inspirational #Growing Up #Age
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“I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Religious #Political #Dogma
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“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Hatred #Easier #Clear
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“I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Spiritual #Mean #Matter
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“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Nature #Spring #Garden
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“Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Lonely #Book #Writing
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“A word after a word after a word is power.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Inspirational #Life #Reading
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“I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Mistake #Book #Views
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“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Reading #Believe #Writing
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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.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Democracy #Citizens #Fabric
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“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Mother #Wish #Suits
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“I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Powerful #Believe #Struggle
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“A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Broken Heart #Lost Love #Divorce
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“There's more private security in the United States than there are publicly funded forces, like police. What you don't want is a meld of government and commerce - you really want to keep those two things separate - because once you have that meld, you've got megacorruption, and you have no third force to whom you can say this stuff is poisoning our kids.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Kids #Government #Two
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“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Love You #Weapons #Facts
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“We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Running #Cutting #Issues
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“Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Space #Fiction #Planets
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“Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Fiction #Science Fiction #Planets
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“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Patience #Children #Wall
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“Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Pain #Writing #Exercise
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“Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Thinking #Littles #Sometimes
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“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Cute #Family #Girl
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“There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Thinking #Mirrors #People
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“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”
-- Margaret Atwood
#Writing #Thinking #Trying
