But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she’d make some excuse – jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.
Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.
An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.
Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.
Considering that the whole point of Consilience is for things to run smoothly, with happy citizens, or are they inmates? Both, to be honest. Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.
There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians. I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did remembering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.
My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.
All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognized this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.
Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.
All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.
Who can fathom the secrets of the human soul?” I said. “None of us is exempt from sin”.
What touches you is what you touch.
I don’t need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you’re foaming at the mouth.
A momentary psychotic break,” I’d said. “The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.
The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend – a madman, say – Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.
But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity.
Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn’t there, it’s nothing.
I’m training to be an Aunt,” I said. “I’m not really supposed to like anyone.
No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish.
Never trust a man with new clothes.