Quotes from book

The Year of the Flood

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”

“… we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

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

“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.”

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

“Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.”

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine! Mine!”

“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 are using up the Earth. It is almost gone.”