All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always approximate.
Margaret Atwood
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
Margaret Atwood
Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
Margaret Atwood
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the blind shadow cast by its absence.
Margaret Atwood
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
Margaret Atwood
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?"
Margaret Atwood
The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.
Margaret Atwood
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then.
Margaret Atwood
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth... The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Margaret Atwood