The Year of the Flood Quotes

“The water slides up, then falls back with a gentle hiss, like a big snake breathing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“...só se deve confiar no que não está escrito. O espírito viaja de boca em boca, não de coisa em coisa: livros podem ser queimados, documentos podem ser rasgados, computadores podem ser destruídos. Somente o espírito vive para sempre, e o espírito não é uma coisa.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Saint Laurence “Titus” Oates of the Scott Expedition, who hiked where no man had ever hiked before, and who sacrificed himself during a blizzard for the welfare of his companions.”
― 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

“For all works of Man will be as words written on water.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“And for Adam himself, the Names of the Animals were the first words he spoke — the first moment of Human language. In this cosmic instant, Adam claims his Human soul. To Name is — we hope — to greet; to draw another towards one’s self.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“What is our Cosmos but a snowflake? What is it but a piece of lace?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Her story was that I'd been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you'd trust a rock more than a cake.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. 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. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Then God establishes his Covenant with Noah, and with his sons, "and with every living creature." Many recall the Covenant with Noah, but forget the Covenant with all other living Beings. However, God does not forget it. He repeats the terms "all flesh" and "every living creature" a number of times, to make sure we get the point. No one can make a Covenant with a stone: for a Covenant to exist, there must. be a minimum of two live and responsible parties to it. Therefore the Animals are not senseless matter, not mere chunks of meat. No; they have souls, or God could not have made a Covenant with them. The human Words of God affirm this: "But ask now the beasts," says Job 12, "and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee ... and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

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

“Nuala said it was because women were more ethical, Zeb said it was because they were more squeamish, and Philo said it amounted to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn’t even know would be helped by it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Also we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“And who can say if joy or fear
Are each in other's lasting debt?
Does every Prey enjoy each breath
because of constant threat?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“I don't know how long all of that lasted because time was like rubber, it stretched out like a long, long elastic rope or a huge piece of chewing gum. Then it snapped shut into a tiny black square and I passed out.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Each petal and leaf was fully alive, shining with awareness of her.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“reminds us of our own childhoods. It never hurts us to remember how small we felt then, and how we depended on the strength, knowledge, and wisdom of our elders to keep us safe. Let us teach our Children tolerance, and loving-kindness, and correct boundaries, as well as joyful laughter. As God contains all things good, He must also contain a sense of playfulness — a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“He didn't wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like attacking the tide.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“the Corps have now developed a hybrid bee. It is not a genetic splice, my Friends. No: it is a greater abomination! Bees are seized while still in larval form, and micro-mechanical systems are inserted into them. Tissue grows around the insert, and when the full adult or “imago” emerges, it is a bee cyborg spy controllable by a CorpSeCorps operator, equipped to transmit, and thus to betray.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Then they turned to the problem of the animal-skin clothing provided by God for Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3. The troublesome “coats of skins.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“in the future you’d be able to get your very own pig made, with second copies of everything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“He created us through the long and complex process of Natural and Sexual Selection, which is none other than His ingenious device for instilling humility in Man.”
― 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!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood