Atwood, on Grace Marks, from Alias Grace:

Well, she doesn't have a middle-class, genteel imagination, which would have said, "I couldn't wear that dress, that's the dress the dead person ..." She doesn't have that kind of sensibility. A shawl is a shawl, a dress is a dress. You don't just throw something like that away. Shoes are shoes. When you travel in India, you find that everything is used, just everything. You don't find any plastic bags blowing around because nobody would let a plastic bag go to waste. It would be used for this and that, and when finally it can't hold anything anymore, it would be cut up into decorations. This is where the patchwork quilt came from; you don't throw things out, you make them into something else.