Margaret Atwood

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.

The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart

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?

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle _ that should be his tone.

I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.