The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them, opening themselves like black umbrellas.

He was a wiry guy with a shaved head and black, shiny, alert eyes like the heads of ants, and he was easy as long as everything was cool.

there were too many crooks in the pulpit and too many dupes in the pews.

The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.

one bottle of tiger-bone wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.

as Adam One used to say, hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

During the glory days of Secret-Burgers, there were very few bodies found in vacant lots.

“They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude towards shopping.

Why did He not make us pure Spirit, like Himself? Why did he embed us in perishable matter, and a matter so unfortunately Monkey-like? So goes the ancient

God’s commandment to “replenish the Earth” did not mean we should fill it to overflowing with ourselves, thus wiping out everything else.

He was large and solid, with a biker’s beard and long hair — brown with a little grey in it — and a leathery face, and eyebrows like a barbed-wire fence. He looked as if he ought to have a silver tooth and a tattoo, but he didn’t. He was strong as a bouncer, and he had the same menacing but genial expression, as if he’d break your neck if necessary, but not for fun.

Or she could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?

Bernice was mean, but Amanda was tough, which is different.

Amanda said if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.

The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.

The Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vast-ness that encircles us.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

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.

Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

This girl had more moves than an octopus, and her plankwork was astonishing.

Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.

The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, We are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?