“Why do Twolegs do anything? If we knew that, our lives would be a lot easier.”
“No era un monstruo. Era un ser humano normal y corriente. Cruel, imbécil y rencoroso. Igual que todos los demás.”
“There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other people dying of starvation by calling the place the dying live “the third world.”
“They put money into attack, by calling it defence.”
“Relationships are where we humans get our greatest education.”
“Living things aren t finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known - these things are still at work in them; nothing s finished. ( The Graveyard Reader )”
“There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.”
“My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins. I know this is troubling. I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns. Chimps. There s no excuse for them.”
“Man can t handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don t think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad.”
“Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.”
“Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”
“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 that 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, said Crake. An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid. Your analogy falls down when it comes to female artists, said Jimmy. They re not in it to get laid. They d gain no biological advantage from amplifying themselves, since potential mates would be deterred rather than attracted by this sort of amplification. Men aren t frogs, they don t want women who are ten times bigger than them. Female artists are biologically confused, said Crake.”
“People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.”
“When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order to simply move forward through their days. If that suspension faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was everywhere--in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and pencils--well you would fly for the first nest in a tree, run flat-out for the first burrow you saw.”
“You humans live in shallow waters”
“You sip the water from the same ocean in which all the hope was lost. Us”
“..само държавата може да създаде ред, а и път - това е непосилно за варварите. По трахеите, с които опасахме земната твърд, вече се движат не само армията, нито само керваните, пътищата свързват човешките същества, като ни обединяват в общ организъм, в единно цяло. Всеки път има начало и край и никой, тръгнал по него не може да се изгуби.”