Kristen

“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, The Blind Assassin

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“(On religion) "I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; the ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Sometimes I think," she said slowly, "that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn't make it past noon.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry