An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

— Margaret Atwood

An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?"" I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous." You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse.

— Margaret Atwood

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.

— Margaret Atwood

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

— Margaret Atwood

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

— Margaret Atwood

A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

— Margaret Atwood

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

— Margaret Atwood

As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore, anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.

— Margaret Atwood

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

— Margaret Atwood

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

— Margaret Atwood