Quotes from book

Oryx and Crake

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”

“But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.”

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

“Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

“We understand more than we know.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

“The proper study of Mankind is Everything.”

“I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.”

“EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?”

“Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.”

“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.”

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”