“ There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-lo… Margaret Atwood
“ There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. Margaret Atwood
“ The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later. Margaret Atwood
“ 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… Margaret Atwood
“ The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over. Margaret Atwood
“ The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a… Margaret Atwood
“ The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they’re doing a good job of it now; Margaret Atwood
“ The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. Margaret Atwood
“ That way nobody feels exploited.Wait a minute, says Stan. Nobody’s exploited?I said nobody feels exploited, says Budge. Different thing. Margaret Atwood
“ Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slave… Margaret Atwood
“ Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. they dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and… Margaret Atwood
“ So that’s what art is, for the artist, said Crake. An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid. Margaret Atwood
“ She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else’s reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way. Margaret Atwood
“ She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have f… Margaret Atwood
“ Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. Margaret Atwood
“ Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they… Margaret Atwood
“ Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to… Margaret Atwood
