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.
We’ve learned to see the world in gasps.
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
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.
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.
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.
Not real can tell us about real.
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.
Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
I suppose it’s everyone’s fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.
Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.
Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.