The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

Everything is different up close.

every hollow space invites invasion.

When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.

The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing.

You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.

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

Some would term our efforts futile, but if all were to follow our example, what a change would be wrought on our beloved Planet!

It’s daybreak. The break of day. Toby turns this word over: break, broke, broken. What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

The trees look as innocent as ever; yet she has the feeling that someone’s watching her — as if even the most inert stone or stump can sense her, and doesn’t wish her well.

Isolation produces suc...

My body is shrinking, she thinks. I’m puckering, I’m dwindling. Soon I’ll be nothing but a hangnail.

In our efforts to rise above ourselves we have indeed fallen far, and are falling farther still; for, like the Creation, the Fall, too, is ongoing. Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything?

you trade what you have to. You don’t always have choices.

You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all.

She must fight against lethargy. It’s a strong desire — to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever.

For drinking Life there are two cups, Nuala taught the small children. What’s in each of them might be exactly the same, but my, oh my, the taste is so different! The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy — Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

That was because the Gardeners didn’t bother with marriage certificates. They endorsed fidelity as long as a pair-bonding was current but there was no record of the first Adam and the first Eve going through a wedding, so in their eyes neither the clergymen of other religions nor any secular official had the power to marry people.

Among the Gardeners, weddings were simple affairs. Both parties had to proclaim in front of witnesses that they loved each other. They exchanged green leaves to symbolize growth and fertility and jumped over a bonfire to symbolize the energy of the universe, then declared themselves married and went to bed. For divorces they did the whole thing in reverse: a public statement of non-love and separation, the exchange of dead twigs, and a swift hop over a heap of cold ashes.

They looked up to him. It wasn’t only because of his size. It was because he had lore, and it was lore they respected.