“Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.”

“What do you want me to do?” he whispers into the empty air.It’s hard to know.Oh Jimmy, you were so funny.Don’t let me down.From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face.Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.”

“Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.”

“Oryx,” he says. “I know you’re there.” He repeats the name. It’s not even her real name, which he’d never known anyway; it’s only a word. It’s a mantra. Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she’s pale and shadowy, but if he can say her name over and over, then maybe she’ll glide into his body and be present with him in his flesh, and his hand on himself will become her hand. But she’s always been evasive, you can never pin her down. Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark.”

“All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...”

“He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.”

“…Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck.’‘How do you account for that?’ said Jimmy.‘Imagination,’ said Crake, ‘Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds - in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they don’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.’‘As a species we’re doomed by hope then?’ ‘You could call it hope. That, or desperation.’ ‘But we’re doomed without hope, as well,’ said Jimmy.‘Only as individuals,’ said Crake cheerfully.‘Well, it sucks.’‘Jimmy, grow up.’Crake wasn’t the first person who ever said that to Jimmy.”