The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything?

Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The part you could see — what most people called a mushroom — was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.

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

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much?

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.

She knew more now, however. As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

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.

How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.

She opens her eyes: tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t in the picture because I’m the frame, she thinks. It’s not really the past. It’s only me, holding it all together. It’s only a handful of fading neural pathways. It’s only a mirage.

Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Nature full strength is more than we can take,

Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?

Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.