Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.