While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Interpretation
The past can seem charming only when viewed from a distance, not while experiencing it.
Margaret Atwood's quote reflects on the nature of time and memory, suggesting that our experiences are often difficult and unremarkable as we live through them. It is only upon reflection, when we are removed from those experiences, that we can appreciate their beauty and significance, seeing them as part of our life's decor rather than the constraints they felt like at the time.
In practice
In a speech about life's lessons, you might reference this quote to highlight the importance of reflecting on our experiences.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.
Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
It is out of the question that the task of socialist women's activity should be to alienate proletarian women from duties as wives and mothers; on the contrary, it must operate so this task is fulfilled better than before, precisely in the interests of the proletariat.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
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