Speaker For The Dead Quotes
"Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence."
"The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have."
"A moment ago Rooter had been shimmying up trees, gripping the bark with only the horny pads on his ankles and inside his thighs."
"I wish I had pads on my legs like yours. The bark on that tree would rip my skin to shreds."
"In any event, Pipo spoke quickly to calm him. 'Don't worry, I'm too old and soft to climb trees like that. I'll leave it to you younglings.'"
"We're smarter. Then Rooter leaned back and spun around on his buttocks so his back was toward Pipo. 'Go back behind your fence,' he said."
"Pipo sighed silently, even as he froze his smile in place. The law strictly forbade him to share information about human society, lest it contaminate piggy culture."
"If it weren't for the ansible, providing instantaneous communication among the Hundred Worlds, we could not possibly maintain a common language."
"I can imagine. She said, more or less, that if her parents were actually listening to prayers and had any influence in heaven to get them granted, then why wouldn't they have answered her prayer, for them to return from the grave?"
"The science of xenology insists on more mysteries than Mother Church."
"But there was a chance that one was near enough that sometime– twenty, thirty, forty years from now– he would come in from the starport and begin to uncover the truth."
"Choose to come, she said in silence to the unknown hearer of the call."
"She felt his breath like the breeze of a beloved garden and felt safe, felt at home."
"Something closed inside her; she had not noticed the hope she felt until she lost it."
"It was a lonely, tortured young girl named Novinha that he thought of."
"I'm much more complex than that. Anticipated self-pity is what I'm feeling."
"I ask people questions and try to find out true stories."
"This boy enjoyed deceiving me, and then enjoyed even more letting me see how I'd been fooled."
"I root my face in the ground for you, Miro, my limbs are lumber for your house."
"Talk to me in piddle-geese!" wheezed Leaf-eater.
"Don't be crude," he said. Then he walked away.
"I understand," said Ender. "With your father so recently dead."
"Grego has given me a little gift. It's the only thing he has to give me, and he made it himself, so it means all the more."
"The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life."
"I left her a mere ten days ago, and now, already, I feel the lack of her."
"Don't weep for us, Speaker Andrew. We have far more joy than suffering."
"Ah, another one who's curious about our celibate marriage."
"The monastery becomes our family, and to leave it would be as painful as divorce."
"Everything that wasn't a vegetable garden was abandoned to weeds and unmown grass."
"Beware, then, or the Lord of the Harvest will burn you with the tares."
"Damnation is only a breath away, and there's no hope of getting me to repent."
"No world dares offend us, because they would be cut off from all advances in science, technology, art, literature, learning, and entertainment."
"It does not come from great armies or irresistible armadas, It comes from our control of the network of ansibles that carry information instantly from world to world."
"The inescapable conclusion is that the presently observed changes in piggy culture are the direct result of deliberate human intervention."
"You have obviously given us more trust than you ever planned."
"If this is part of some master plan of yours, Ender, I admit it's much too deep for me."
"The fact that the amaranth, if the new plant is indeed that Earthborn grain, has provided a useful protein base for the piggies implies that it has been genetically altered to meet the piggies' metabolic needs."
"I'm afraid that this voyage has cost me more than any other."
"I don't care what you want, I'm not doing it for you."
"You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen."
"I wish you had taken every one of her secrets and published them through all the Hundred Worlds!"
"The power of Starways Congress has been sufficient to keep the peace, not only between worlds but between nations on each single world, and that peace has lasted for nearly two thousand years."
"It wasn't a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely."
"Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before."
"Nobody else is asking questions. It's so funny, isn't it?"
"I haven't discovered any answers. But at least I know what some of the questions are."
"There are ten thousand ecological niches here that are completely unfilled."
"The cabras have a huddling behavior pattern. Protect them from what?"
"It's as if you could go back, to old Earth, back before the Xenocide, and say, You can travel among the stars."
"You can study beasts and not care a bit when one of them drops dead."
"We are dead! We are being murdered every day."
"It's happening to your other self. It's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care."
"Do you think we're making a mistake? Fortunately, humankind isn't the judge that matters."
"What you're forgetting is that I'm not here as a scientist to study them. I'm here as an ambassador to make a treaty with them."
"She says why are you going, you haven't been given permission to go."
"I'm just afraid that by the time this thing is over, we may need another Ender."
"All the people in this story suffered pain. All of them sacrificed for the people they loved."
"We're afraid the piggies will do the same to us. And they know that's what it means. They know it, and they hate it."
"It's good to hear Jane speak to him again, good to know he would have her help."
"It's a wonder they manage to reproduce at all."
"They and the macios must have been competitors."
"We're studying piggy society, not the distant evolutionary past."
"The same hand that signed for the humans also took the covenant in our way, too."
"All things coming clear, all things coming together."
"The hive queen was being restored as soon as Novinha found a way for her to resist the Descolada."
"To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control."
"We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe."
"Our greatness is your greatness, and yours is ours."
"A brother can think of many different things."
"The third life is when we reach and drink from the sun."
"Once she comes to trust you, keep her with you always."
"The fence, its shadow so dark in the minds of all who had lived within its bounds, now still and harmless, invisible, insubstantial."
"When you really know somebody, you can't hate them."
"We never can sort out cause and effect. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause."
"Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore."
"What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore."
"We thought they wanted to kill us. We were wrong, but we had no way to know that."
"We believe it enough to act as though it's true. When we're that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it."
"I'm more arrogant than that. I'm betting your life, too, and everybody else's."
"If I asked them whether they'd trust the Speaker for the Dead, they'd say yes."
"It'd be like him passing from his second life to his third."
"As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes."
"Are you sure she won't try to wipe out humankind, starting with you?"
"I'm betting your life, too, and everybody else's, and I'm not so much as asking anyone else's opinion."
"It may not be possible to get the one without the other."
"You killed more people than anybody in history."
"But when you Spoke for Father, you made me feel sorry for him."
"There are worse reasons to die than to die because you cannot bear to kill."
"What about someone who can't kill, and can't die, and can't live, either?"