Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake (2003)

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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Margaret Atwood
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

Margaret Atwood
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

Margaret Atwood
You can't buy it, but it has a price, said Oryx. Everything has a price.

Margaret Atwood
I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

Margaret Atwood
So that's what art is, for the artist, said Crake. An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

Margaret Atwood
Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

Margaret Atwood
What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude.

Margaret Atwood
He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

Margaret Atwood
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Margaret Atwood
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Margaret Atwood
Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...

Margaret Atwood
Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

Margaret Atwood
Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it.

Margaret Atwood
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

Margaret Atwood
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.

Margaret Atwood
Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

Margaret Atwood
After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

Margaret Atwood
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

Margaret Atwood
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.

Margaret Atwood
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

Margaret Atwood
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Margaret Atwood
But the adjectives change, said Jimmy. Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.

Margaret Atwood
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Margaret Atwood
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Margaret Atwood
How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.

Margaret Atwood
All it takes, said Crake, is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.

Margaret Atwood
Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

Margaret Atwood
EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

Margaret Atwood