I shouldn’t have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?
Such a cruel thing, memory. We can’t remember what it is that we’ve forgotten. That we have been made to forget. That we’ve had to forget, in order to pretend to live here in a normal way.
She was a more charitable person than I was; I admired her in that, but I could not emulate her.
For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny.
I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it’s not Your doing; I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant. I have enough daily bread, so I won’t waste time on that. It isn’t the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.
I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies. A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.
The living bird is not its labeled bones.
I really don’t know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.
On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.
It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.
We talked about our real mothers and how we wanted to know who they’d been. Perhaps we ought not to have shared so much, but it was very comforting. “I wish I had a sister,” she said to me one day. “And if I did, that person would be you.
All that wasted time, and he didn’t even know who’d wasted it.
Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.
Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can’t go on with the story.
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.
Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.
I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.
So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?