The Year of the Flood Quotes

“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 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

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

“The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They’d reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Everyone’s too sad for everything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“I’m such a mess,” he says. “Sometimes I think everyone’s dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Shiny new toes make you feel all fresh and sparkling: if someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought - kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges - that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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 the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The liver is evil and must be punished.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“On one wall there was a recent watercolour — Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague,”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“You wouldn't think it would be Toby--she was so tough and hard--but if you're drowning, a soft squashy thing is no good to hold on to. You need something more solid.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Dear Diplodicus; dear Pterosaur; dear Trilobite; dear Mastodon, dear Dodo, dear Great Auk, dear Passenger Pigeon, dear Panda, dear Whooping Crane; and all you countless others who have played in this our shared Garden in your day: be with us at this time of trial, and strengthen our resolve. Like you, we have enjoyed the air and the sunlight and the moonlight on the water; like you, we have heard the call of the seasons and have answered them. Like you, we have replenished the Earth. And like you, we must now witness the end of our Species, and pass from Earthly view." -Adam One”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

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

“I had no direction in life, and I felt numb inside, like an orphan.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I’d drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“As for the adverse publicity, they could squelch it at source, since the media Corps controlled what was news and what wasn’t. 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

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

“Sk my dk, it's organic!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood