The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?You could call it hope. That, or desperation.But we’re doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

Burst pipes were an English tradition, like so many others.Like, for instance, English men. Charm the knickers off you with their mellow vowels and frivolous verbiage, and then, once they’d got them off, panic and...

But I couldn’t have brought the child here, I never identified it as mine; I didn’t name it before it was born even, the way you’re supposed to. It was my husband’s, he imposed it...

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves — our own hungers,...

Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they...

The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can’t be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it’s a freshness, a plumpness of...

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up...

If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

The main thing is to keep yourself awake [on writing]

Being here with him is safety; it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I...

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Creating some god for one’s inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

Every war is the war for whoever’s lived through it.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she’d married money — crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything...

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much?

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon…

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into...

I beliebe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won’t find it out that way. He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the...

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

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...

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been...

There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

That’s what you get for being food.

But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she’d make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar...

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?’

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they’re not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They’re a group phenomenon, they’re not very fast,...

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can...

I think of this as a democratizing device.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the...

… Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething...