A Quote by Margaret Atwood

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names. — © Margaret Atwood
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.
She felt as if she had strayed into a fairy tale, as full of peril as of wonder, a place where anything could happen.
Don't be that guy that's laying in that hospital bed going, 'I wonder what would have happened if I tried it?' The worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't work.
From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.
You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.
Seriously, I am not a person that I think much about what happened or what didn't happen or what could happen. I happy about the things that happened to me. I'm a lucky person, for sure, for all the things that happened to me during my life.
You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d…’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it.
And now, I'm a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I'll wake up from.
There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.
There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.
There are times to let things happen, and times to make things happen. Now is that time. You will either make things happen, watch what happens, or wonder what happened.
The world is divided into three types of people in business: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.
A couple days before the stunts, if I'm doing something particularly dangerous, I will go over every worst-case scenario in my head, like this could happen, this could happen, this could happen, this could happen. I try to think about that to where it's ingrained in me.
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