Margaret Atwood

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

“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 it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

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

As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

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

I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.

“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain."

Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”