Michael Willems

“Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem to be 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 to do you account for that?" said Jimmy

"Imagination," said Crake. "Men can imagine their own deaths...human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else...and live on forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won'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 were 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.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs