Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!
If only he could be like that – intellectually honourable. Another baffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing.
How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it.
Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance – we hear a capital W on Writer.
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn.
God isn’t what they say,” she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.
Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us mythologies are different.
She’s just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it’s not, it’s the worst, it’s the worst feeling there is – incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like a view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness.
Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.
Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held in reserve for something more important than present company.
They were reducing us to animals – to penned-up animals – to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.
There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.
The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.
He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he’d like to be somebody else.
I believe in effort, but not in unnecessary effort: Aunt Vidala was most likely negotiating her exit from this world all on her own.
The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.
I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears.
I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.
Who invented the word love?
I’ve described our life as peaceful, and to the outward eye it was; but there were inner storms and turmoils that I have since come to learn are not uncommon among those seeking to dedicate themselves to a higher cause.