Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1) QUOTES

2 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

4 " Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

6 " Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

8 " Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

10 " How much misery . . . how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there'd be no more sexual torment. Better plan - make it cyclical and also inevitable, as in the other mammals. You'd never want someone you couldn't have. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

12 " He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

14 " They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

16 " Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

18 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

20 " Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself? "

― Margaret Atwood , Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)