For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
I was taking something away from her, although she didn’t know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn’t want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious “it” I couldn’t quite define.
Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I’m not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls.
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.
I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
I don’t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it’s an equal darkness. Or light.
She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she’s looked that way ever since she was two.
The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.
So we couldn’t mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way – we caught it like germs.
Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins.
He feels the need to hear a human voice – a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion – his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.
Those walls and bars are there for a reason,′ said Crake. ′ Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.
China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.
Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.
At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.
Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I’d buried there growing themselves a body.
Pearls are congealed oyster spit.