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"Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?"
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"Feed your mind with thoughts that inspire, motivate, encourage, empower, educate and instruct you by deliberately choosing the information you allow into your world through sight, sound and people."

"There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don't understand. And incomprehension is boredom."

"When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring."

"No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline."

"We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love."

"In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway."

"We try so hard to hide everything we're really feeling from those who probably need to know our true feelings the most. People try to bottle up their emotions, as if it's somehow wrong to have natural reactions to life."

"We live with the key purpose of receiving the approval of those around us because we don't know who we are in reality."

"Your mind is filled with ample secret abilities not known to you, keep it active by shutting down disbelieve."

"Because of propaganda induced cognitive dissonance, most people hate themselves and don't even know it."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define."

"But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep."

"If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it."

"These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency."

"God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?"

"Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word 'undone'. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose."

"Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space."

"Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from."

"It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know."

"He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around."
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