LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Fall 2015
is the ending like?
human nature?
In the village it was not called
(116; ch. 6)selling,
this transaction. The talk about it implied apprenticeship. The children were being trained to earn their living in the wide world: this was the gloss put on it. Besides, if they stayed where they were, what was there for them to do?
Oryx was sold to a man who made movies. She was the only one of them that went with the movie man. […] He asked her wouldn’t she like to be in a movie. She’d never seen a movie so she didn’t know whether she would like it or not; but it sounded like an offer of a treat, so she said yes. By this time she was good at knowing when yes was the expected answer.
(136; ch. 6)
So I learned about life,said Oryx.
Learned what?said Jimmy. He shouldn’t have had the pizza, and the weed they’d smoked on top of that. He was feeling a little sick.
That everything has a price.
Not everything. That can’t be true. You can’t buy time. You can’t buy …He wanted to say love, but hesitated. It was too soppy.
You can’t buy it, but it has a price,said Oryx.Everything has a price.
Not me,said Jimmy, trying to joke.I don’t have a price.Wrong, as usual. (139; ch. 6)
But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.(144; ch. 6)
She [Oryx] turned into the camera and there it was again, that look, that stare, the stare that went right into him [Jimmy] and saw him as he truly was.(308; ch. 12)
Rich was just a thing you learned to tell.(136; ch. 6)
Perhaps they’ll say, These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away.(222; ch. 9)
Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother’s love – the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely – but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many people who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.(126; ch. 6)
What people want is perfection,said the man.In themselves.
But they need the steps to it to be pointed out,said the woman.
In simple order,said the man.
With encouragement,said the woman.And a positive attitude.
They like to hear about the before and the after,said the man.It’s the art of the possible. But with no guarantees, of course.(246; ch. 10)
Crake still had a collection of fridge magnets, but they were different ones. No more science quips.
- Where God is, Man is not.
- There are two moons, the one you can see and the one you can’t.
- Du musz dein Leben andern.
- We understand more than we know.
- I think, therefore.
- To stay human is to break a limitation.
- Dream steals from its lair towards its prey. (301; ch. 12)