When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

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.