Ruins Quotes
"The goal of a parasite is like that of any other life form—to survive and reproduce."
"I’ve slept on hard floors and on grass and pine needles, and unless there’s a bed..."
"Lost in such thoughts, Rigg did not notice the first building that came in sight."
"If he truly thought of Vadesh as only a machine, rudeness would not be an issue."
"I still live in the world he built around me."
"I didn’t exactly open up and bare my soul to you, either."
"One of the best things about finding out I have a brother is that I inherit all his friends."
"He taught me everything he wanted me to know."
"None of us knows what we’re doing. We’re all still learning, we all still need each other."
"It’s a lot more fun to hear stories about other people than to live through them yourself."
"Maybe you come all this way and the story goes on down a tunnel and you’re left behind, no longer part of it."
"Actually, I don’t think taking off the facemask would kill Loaf, because Loaf would kill you before you got close to succeeding."
"Loaf would’ve—the facemask controlling Loaf would have torn you apart as you tried."
"If it was just the facemask, using Loaf’s body, using a soldier’s reflexes, and you posed a threat, he’d just have killed you. But he didn’t. He only stopped you."
"Breaking him into small pieces would make me feel better."
"Oh, there’s one way to hurt him, We could leave this wallfold, so he can’t see how his experiment turned out."
"You’re slicing time, you’re moving forward without living through the intervening moments."
"If I lost the facemask, my own eyes would grow back. It’s changed every part of me. My body can regenerate now, just like the facemask can."
"We have a little over two years before the humans from Earth arrive for the first time since the terraforming of Garden."
"But people of Odinfold, from a different version of our future, wrote an account of the end of the world and sent it back to us five thousand years ago, just before they died."
"We have machines that can send things to any past time and to any place on Garden."
"But we owed a duty to the whole world of Garden."
"We got a letter from the future, telling us how the world ends."
"We went into the genes themselves, the seeds within the human body that decide what each new generation will look like."
"We made ourselves tall and slender at first," said Swims-in-the-Air.
"We rebuilt ourselves to concentrate on the brain," said Mouse-Breeder.
"It's the grammar of grammars, the key to all vocabulary," explained Mouse-Breeder.
"Human beings were not meant to lead such solitary lives."
"It's not about wanting," said Mouse-Breeder. "The body still has its primate roots. The body wants to breed."
"Give just the tiniest thought to the question," said Mouse-Breeder.
"I thought you said you broke into the programs," said Umbo.
"Don't delay too long. Don't go back and try new things for too many cycles."
"I'm an idiot," said Umbo, "but I still vote for it. Which should prove to all of you that it's an absolutely stupid idea."
"Life is the soul. Living things have souls, have minds, have thought. Living individuals have their own relationship to the planet they dwell on."
"Computers are imitation intelligence. Memory and speed, but no brains. Just programs."
"Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines."
"It's hard to imagine that I've somehow made the destruction of Garden worse. Will they say bad words while they wipe out all life on Garden?"
"As long as winning doesn’t matter, then you can have rules and make a game of it."
"You mean, all except the expendable who was with the Ram Odin who left out the word ‘immediately.’"
"When armies benefit from being perceived as necessary, and war provides a means of gaining prestige and leverage over the government."
"There’s nothing to find. It’s not in the genes. The part of us that lays down paths through time, tied to the gravity of a planet—it’s not in the brain."
"The Odinfolders aren’t lying. They think there’s a machine. But there never was."
"But he waited a fraction of a second and in that moment realized what the result would be—his own death—so he moved away from me as he said, ‘Obey only me.’"
"They click their teeth, they tap their toes. They slide and brush against surfaces, they sigh and gasp. It is a language as complete as any other."
"You had not yet commanded me not to obey the mice."
"I’m afraid our rodent companions have the odd notion that because they created us, after a fashion, they can do with us whatever they want."
"It’s the mistake a lot of parents make about their children."
"They’re practically screaming that it’s very, very true."
"We can break their little skulls under our feet."
"And let’s remember. They can’t time-shift, but what if they change their minds about giving us the missing jewel?"
"The only strings we can cut are the ones that we can see."
"All we can ever do is guess based on the information we have."
"We’ll try to keep Earth and Garden both alive."
"If we change his choice, we undo all of human history on Garden."
"We never know anything. That’s what you’re saying."
"I’ve been circling the landing site for some time now."
"By learning something about us that they couldn’t find out any other way."
"You’re a scholar. You learn all kinds of useless things."
"Why not just go back in time and leave them here?"
"It is the companion of my heart," she said. "It is the sister of my soul."
"My friend breathes the water, and passes the result to me in my blood."
"If you think, from my actions, that I have concluded that the facemask is in complete control, all you have to do to avoid my actions is to jump into the past and out of my reach."
"We're all deceivers, Rigg Sessamekesh," said Vadesh. "I'm just better at it."
"If it’s ever easy for you to kill a man, then something has already died inside you."
"But that's not a story," said Knosso. "I assure you, when they make up stories here, they know how to make an ending, one that would leave you gasping or laughing, I can promise you!"
"I try not to be part of indiscriminate murder," said Olivenko.
"Then we have much to talk about, my friend—may I call you my friend, now that you’re a man grown? I’ve found the answers to so many questions, and then so many more questions beyond those."
"In the end of this silent war, it turned out that the vulnerability of the facemask came from the sheer sameness of its weaponry."
"We all lie to Vadesh"—that was their code, their desperate attempt to signal Rigg, against all of Ram Odin’s orders, that there was something in Vadesh’s starship that they all were trying to resist as best they could.