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.
But I envy the Commander’s Wife her knitting. It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained.
I hunger to commit the act of touch.
That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first in your head, and then you make it real.
What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. 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.
His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.