Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar----paying for the privilege of sanity with...
Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funer...
Those who have been in trouble themselves are alert to it in others
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 have a mind. They me...
There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers...
The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou...
Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I d...
Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.
So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.
So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. Don’t even think about it, he tells...
She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out.
She who pays the undertaker calls the tune.
Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.
Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.
Oryx, he says. I know you’re there. He repeats the name. It’s not even her real name, which he’d never known anyway; it’s only a word. It’s a mantra. Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she’s pa...
On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as...
Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.