Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

"So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs."

"What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question."

"Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar."