We've learned to see the world in gasps.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

My father was a forest entomologist, which means he was aware that spraying forests for spruce budworm was counterproductive in that it didn't really work, and it killed everything else in the forests, and it wasn't good for the people who were exposed to it, either. So he was an early proponent of not doing that, but, of course, nobody listened.