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"I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge."
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"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."
"Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way."
"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?"
"Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk."
"Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood
"And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading."
"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."
"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."
"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."
"Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?"
"These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency."
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