The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

What a horror — to turn the Soul’s husk into an unholy fetish! And, in the end, how selfish! Shall we not repay the gift of Life by regifting ourselves to Life when the time comes?

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