They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.
This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
I’m not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.
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.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s past time, and then time folds again.
Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.
Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, ‘I’ll be dead,’ you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar.
Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.