The Year of the Flood Quotes

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“All Creatures know that some must die
That all the rest may take and eat;
Sooner or later, all transform
Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat.

But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,
And writes his abstract Laws on stone;
For this false Justice he has made,
He tortures limb and crushes bone.

Is this the image of a god?
My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?
Oh, if Revenge did move the stars
Instead of Love, they would not shine.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The parts you could see - what most people called a mushroom - was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It's better to hope than mope!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Hunger is the best sauce.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood