The Year of the Flood Quotes

“Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It’s part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we’re stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“... the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and resurfaced.
But still frightened, because when might the whole problem - the whole thing - start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby - being a body, a thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“What you mean is, with God in the story there's a penalty," said Toby.
"Yes," said Adam One. "There's a penalty without God in the story, too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there's a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Weeping willow, weeping willow, branches waving like the sea, While I’m lying on my pillow, come and take my pain from me… Hell”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“it is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends. Let”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

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

“he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Cats of all kinds will set ambushes: one frisks around in the open to distract your attention while another one slips quietly up behind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“violated by bloodshed and gluttony and pride and disdain. Say their Names.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can’t see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But now here they are, right in front of me. It’s like seeing unicorns. I want to hear them purr.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“— a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads — a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn’t starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“… He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand … as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, What may this be, and I was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last. For I thought it might fall suddenly to nothing, for little cause; and I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so has everything its being, through the love of God.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“thumbs-up. We could never make Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a hardass — she and Rebecca were the two hardest asses. Rebecca was jolly on the outside, but you did not push her buttons. As for Toby, she was leathery inside and out. “Don’t try it, Shackleton,” she would say, even though her back was turned. Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you’d”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The cells were referred to as Truffles because they were underground, rare, and valuable, because you never could tell where they might appear next, and because pigs and dogs were employed to sniff them out.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. “Wherever there’s Nature, there’s assholes,” he said cheerfully.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

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

“They'll want revenge, it's only human. They'll be vindictive, like the pigs. But they won't come soon, because they know I have a rifle. They'll have to plan.”
― Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

“There is still life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there’s no longer there’s no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood