Quotes from Oryx and Crake

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“We understand more than we know.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.

Toast is me.

I am toast.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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, quote from Oryx and Crake

“...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 that way: imperfectly monogamous.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.

As a species were doomed by hope, then?

You could call it hope. That, or desperation.

But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.

Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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, quote from Oryx and Crake

“I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem to be able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck."

"How to do you account for that?" said Jimmy

"Imagination," said Crake. "Men can imagine their own deaths...human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else...and live on forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. it must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“expectation isn't the same as desire”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

“So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Oryx and Crake

About the author

Popular quotes

“The world,' he revealed, 'is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames.'
Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every colour. Some peoples flames are so still they don't even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can't look at them without blinking and if you approach, you shine in fire.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from The Book of Embraces

“The Playwright was excited in the way a child is excited on Christmas morning. I liked this. Most people didn't get excited about anything other than their own discontent.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from The Year of Yes

“If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“This was too much for Mrs. Wiggins, who was one of the softest hearted cows that ever lived. “Land sakes,” she said; “we can talk. Here, stop it! or you’ll have me crying too, and believe me, when I cry, I cry!” Freddy”
― quote from Freddy and the Ignormus

“Don't believe that, dear. Don't ever believe that. Nobody's bad just because of the way they look. It's what's inside a person that counts.' 'But, Ma, what's inside a person? When people look different are they different inside, too?' Ma didn't answer, she was looking at her hands now, kneading a ball of dough. Saroj thought she had forgotten her and so she said, 'Ma?' Ma turned her eyes back to Saroj. 'I'll show you in a moment, dear. I'll just finish making these.' Saroj watched the stack of dhal puris grow into a flat round tower and then Ma said she was finished and covered them with a cloth and washed her hands. Then she opened the cupboard where she kept her spare jars and bottles and took out six jars and placed them on the kitchen counter. 'Do you see these jars, Saroj? Are they all the same?' Saroj shook her head. 'No, Ma.' The glasses were all different. There was a short flat one and a tall thin one and a medium-sized one, and other shapes in between. Some were different colours: green or brown or clear. 'All right. Now, just imagine these jars are people. People with different shapes of bodies and colours of skin. Can you do that?' Saroj nodded. 'Right. Well, now the bodies are empty. But look…’ Ma picked up a big glass jug, filled it at the tap and poured water into all the jars. 'See, Saroj? Now all the glasses are filled. All the bodies are alive! They have what we call a spirit. Now, is that spirit the same in all the glasses, or different?' 'It's the same, Ma. So people are —' But Ma broke in. 'Now, can you run into the pantry and get the tin where I keep my dyes? You know it, don't you?' Saroj was back even before Ma had finished speaking. Ma opened the tin and picked up one of the tiny bottles of powdered dye. It was cherry-coloured. Ma held the bottle over one of the jars and tipped a little of the powder into the water. Immediately, the water turned pink-red. Ma returned the cap to the bottle and picked up another one. The water turned lime-green. She did that six times and each time the water turned a different colour so that in the end Ma had six different shaped jars of six different colours. 'So, Saroj, now you answer me. Are these people here all the same inside, or are they all different?' Saroj took her time before answering. She puckered her brow and thought hard. Finally she said, 'Well, Ma, really they're all the same but the colours make them different.' 'Yes, but what is more real, the sameness or the differences?' Saroj thought hard again. Then she said: 'The sameness, Ma. Because the sameness holds up the differences. The differences are only the powders you put in.' 'Exactly. So think of all these people as having a spirit which is the same in each one, and yet each one is also different — that is because each person has a different personality. A personality is made up of thoughts, and everyone has different kinds of thoughts. Some have loving thoughts, some have angry thoughts, some have sad thoughts, some have mean thoughts. Most people have jumbles of thoughts — but everybody's thoughts are different, and so everybody is different. Different outside and different inside. And they see those differences in each other and they squabble and fight, because everyone thinks the way he is, is right. But if they could see through the differences to the oneness beyond, linking them all, then…’ 'Then what, Ma?' 'Then we would all be so wise, Saroj, and so happy!”
― Sharon Maas, quote from Of Marriageable Age

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.