The Year of the Flood Quotes

“If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know - the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: It's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn’t they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: “Ren. Ren. Everyone’s too sad for everything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered that it wasn't enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out loud. Bees were the messengers between this world and the other worlds, Pilar had said. Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can't drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Stretch your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to be accomplished by it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She'd learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb's view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“And still, what a risk he'd taken. The woman was like an amateur car bomb: you never knew when she would explode or who she would take down with her when she did.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Now she said, “I’m up to the four-letter words.” And I said, “You mean the dirty ones, like shit?” And she laughed and said, “Worse ones than that.” And I said, “You mean the c-word and the f-word?” and she said, “No. Like love.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague,” but we did our nails anyway.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It's kind of shocking to hear Toby called a babe; sort of like calling God a studmuffin.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood