Canadian - Novelist | November 18, 1939 -
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
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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.
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There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
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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.
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
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