God is a brain mutation

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. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 377

They know the dawn will come

We Humans must labour to believe, as the other Creatures do not. They know the dawn will come. They can sense it – that ruffling of the half-light, the horizon bestirring itself.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 279

Doomed by hope

"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 their 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 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.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Virago Press, 2004) p. 139