Lucía’s Reviews > The Year of the Flood > Status Update

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

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.

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Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

​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.

Thus the time passed. (...) In any case, time is not a thing that passes (...): it is the sea on which you float.

After a while (...) you wouldn't just cross the line, you'd forget there ever were any lines. You'd do whatever it takes.

She must fight against lethargy. It's a strong desire — to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever. She can't live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can't see any future. Maybe she'll go on from day to day and year to year until she simply withers, folds in on herself, shrivels up like and old spider.

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

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

hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience