Dawn Quotes
"Awakening was hard, as always. The ultimate disappointment."
"She had pleaded for it, but her captors had ignored her. Dressed now, she felt more secure than she had at any other time in her captivity, it was a false security she knew, but she had learned to savor any pleasure, any supplement to her self-esteem that she could glean."
"The ultimate disappointment. It was a struggle to take in enough air to drive off nightmare sensations of asphyxiation."
"Reality was whatever happened, whatever she perceived."
"She had offered to answer their questions if they let her out of her cubical. They refused."
"There was a pause. 'Lilith, what language did he speak?' 'I don't know,' Lilith said."
"Her desire to live is stronger than you realize."
"You have a very long life ahead of you, Lilith. And you have work to do here."
"You'll Awaken a small group of humans, all English-speaking, and help them learn to deal with us."
"We've studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures... We know more of what you're capable of than you do."
"It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don't understand."
"You've been given health. The ooloi have seen to it that you'll have a chance to live on your Earth—not just to die on it."
"We used to treat animals that way—inoculations, surgery, isolation—all for their own good."
"Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed."
"We'll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were."
"You destroyed what wasn't yours. You completed an insane act."
"We serve the ship's needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we would be planetbound without it."
"Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld."
"Your bodies are fatally flawed. The ooloi perceived this at once."
"A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial."
"Intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter."
"You are intelligent... You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found."
"Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, we'll share those abilities with you."
"If this is what they found me for, I wish they'd left me."
"We are committed to the trade as your body is to breathing."
"Then... at least let me make my own records to help me learn your language. We humans need to do such things to help us remember."
"It is not allowed. The people have decided that it should not be allowed."
"This is such a simple thing... I cannot give you such things. Not to write or to read."
"We can make anything your people could, though we would not want to make most of their things."
"She sat down on the ground and leaned back against the pseudotree."
"She wandered, freer than she ever had before through the parklike area outside the living quarters."
"There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair."
"Most of the time she wound up resorting to gestures."
"The only certain communication she managed was in enlisting help from strangers when she was lost."
"People immediately understood not only who she was but where she should be."
"She was a captive. What courtesy did a captive owe beyond what was necessary for self-preservation?"
"She had tried to freeze and listen, just hidden by the trunk of one of the great pseudotrees."
"He was one hundred and twenty years old. He spoke no English."
"We're an adaptable species, but it's wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it."
"Learn our language. When you have, one of us will introduce you to someone who, like Fukumoto, has chosen to live and die among us instead of returning to Earth."
"She only hoped it wasn't too angry with Nikanj."
"That was not exactly anger. It is concerned about Nikanj."
"Because this is a hard time for it—and for you."
"I would rather damage my own brain than yours. I won't damage either."
"There's something wrong with doing it that way—surprising people. It's... treating them as though they aren't people, as though they aren't intelligent."
"It's funny," he said. "You started out years older than me, but I've been Awake for so long... I guess I'm older than you are now."
"I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork—but how the hell do I get out of the field?"
"What's happening?" she asked. "Do either of you speak English?"
"Sometimes, I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and-"
"We don't have to forget what we know. We'll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we'll at least have a chance."
"The price is just the same. When they're finished with us there won't be any real human beings left."
"Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place."
"I had natural childbirth. It wasn't any fun, but it went okay."
"You're probably just what they want in ways I haven't even thought of."
"Why are you going back? Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?"
"They don't teach for free! They didn't save us out of kindness! It's all trade with them."
"You know how many kids I got? They say, 'Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.'"
"Knowing frightened him and made him miserable."
"He still had a right to know. I would want to know."
"They can make people in ways I don't even know how to talk about."
"Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?"
"Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will."
"You want to live," he told her. "You won't squander your life."
"Following the wrong impulse now could kill her."
"Weak and sorrowing, not stupid, but so easily frightened that she could be induced to behave stupidly."
"Harmless, Lilith thought. One person who would not be a threat."
"Her body was wet and slippery, but not heavy."
"Shit!" she whispered minutes later when the reaction began to wane. "Oh shit. It wasn't a dream, I see."
"I hope you're wrong," Tate said. "What have we learned if all we can do now is go on fighting among ourselves?"
"Believe what you want! I'm telling you how to act if you ever want to feel the ground under your feet again!"
"The ship is alive and so is almost everything in it."
"We're an endangered species—almost extinct. If we're going to survive, we need protection."
"The fact that it did was not the fault of human beings."
"I lived in those memories for my two years of solitary. By the time the Oankali showed up in my room, I was ready to move into the present and stay there."
"If you have to do something, it might as well feel good."
"Just wake up a group of them, sit them down, tell them what's going on—they won't believe you, of course—take questions, feed them, and the next day, start on the next batch."
"The Oankali don't eat it," Lilith had told them. "And because we can get along without it, they won't give it to us."
"Some people aren't laughing," he said. "That new man, Van Weerden said he didn't think you were human at all."
"It's all right. They're not standing out there muttering to themselves and believing fantasy."
"I don't want to be that someone," she muttered.
"I know kung fu," he said examining her bruised knuckles.
"He's forty," Lilith had said. "He doesn't seem ugly to me, and if he can deal with my size, I can deal with his."
"You know," she told him, "you could become a target yourself. Some people could decide to take their anger at me out on you."
"It will take some of the negative attention off you. Busy people have less time for fantasizing and fighting."
"I speak their language, Joe, but I've never yet been able to convince them to change one of their decisions."
"We'll do what's necessary," he said. "If we can't, then we won't survive."
"That's foolishness- but it's a lovely foolishness."
"How many times can you have everyone taken from you and still have the will to start again?"
"This is what I know," Lilith said: "Our rescuers, our captors are extraterrestrials."
"We need to know them for what they are, even if there are no human parallels."
"Victor Dominic," Joseph said. "And Leah and that guy she's picked up and Beatrice Dwyer and-"
"Loyalties can change according to who people are sleeping with," Lilith said.
"What the hell is she saving herself for? It's her duty to get together with someone. There aren't that many of us left."
"It's my duty to find out where I am and how to get free."
"Nobody here is property. Nobody here has the right to the use of anybody else's body."
"We stay human. We treat each other like people, and we get through this like people."
"Anyone who wants to be something less will have his chance in the forest."
"It's hard enough for human beings to be friends with each other."
"How can you be this strong? How can you do all this?"
"This would be so goddamn much easier if I weren't human."