"Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means."

"Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit."

"The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others."

"So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way-we caught it like germs."

"For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go."

"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 many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well."

"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 in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you."

"But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are."

"Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral."

"Some people write letters, in the library."

"If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?"

"I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions."

"I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills."

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

"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized."

"What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers."

"Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom."

"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, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it."

"I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals."

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

"Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void."

"I want, I don't want.How can one live with such a heart?"

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print."

"Sauve qui peut. To survivewe'd all turn thiefand rascal, or so says the fox,with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,her white knife of a smile,who knows just where she's going:to steal somethingthat doesn't belong to her -some chicken, or one more chance,or other life."

"A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying."

"If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know."

"Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along."

"We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"

"Surviving Is the only warWe can afford."

"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."

"Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush."

"But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really 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 about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

"Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning."

"They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply."

"As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me."

"I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I've broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face. Without warning: I wasn't thinking about here or there or anywhere. If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear."

"What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it."

"I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not."

"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

"I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag."

"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. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel."

"Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it."

"This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love."

"How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."

"A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you."

"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."

"Also I could hear Amanda's voice: Why are you being so weak? Love's never a fair trade. So Jimmy's tired of you, so what, there's guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they're wilted. But you have to act like you're having a spectacular time and every day's a party."

"Night falls. Or has fallen. 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, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket."