A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances;...

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or...

By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you...

The whole world is now one vast uncontrollable experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to...

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it’s the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not...

The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers,...

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing,...

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God....

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which...

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening...

It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.

I love you. You’re the only one.” She isn’t the first woman he’s ever said that to. He shouldn’t have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn’t have treated it like...

I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

[T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed...

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

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.

The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it’s my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible...

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage,...

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn’t...

I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even...

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking...

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t...

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

They’ve removed anything you can tie a rope to.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you...

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.