Embassytown Quotes
"Each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening."
"The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself."
"When they speak they do hear the soul in each voice."
"It’s not true, not for the human voice. But the Ariekei... when they speak they do hear the soul in each voice."
"They make similes long before you lot ever touched down."
"With anything they could get their hands on."
"They had to make it so they could say 'It’s like the rock which was split and fixed.'"
"We can’t learn it, all we can do’s teach ourselves something with the same noises."
"Our minds aren’t like theirs. We had to misunderstand Language to learn it."
"What the colony needed, someone had joked, were single people split in two."
"They spoke it horribly, we now know, and there were innumerable misunderstandings."
"Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being."
"I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions directly."
"I realised I was making myself useful just as I’d been asked to."
"She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa."
"You don’t have to understand something to blame someone for it."
"What if AgNes were right? If so, and I played the particular last contact-card I had, it would be, I supposed, a betrayal of Embassytown."
"The notion of an Ambassador having separate rooms, doing different things, still reeled me."
"The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding."
"Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s... pilfering and cannon-fire."
"There’s always argy-bargy, Avice," he said, and leaned toward the screen."
"The evolution of trust... 'There’s no need for trust, this way,' he interrupted."
"It’s astonishing, given what Language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived."
"Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite?"
"We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after."
"Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do."
"I’m not like you. Forgive me. Tell her something from me. Please forgive me. I’m not so strong. I’ve had enough."
"Take it apart and see if you can find out what’s happening."
"Christ knows what he saw in my face right then."
"I didn’t feel it. I didn’t know. How could... I didn’t know."
"We’re worrying about the addicts, but we need to think about them, too."
"I had to... we separate sometimes now, we have to, a little bit."
"We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse."
"We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey."
"We are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal."
"It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition, so not war at all really but something more pathological."
"I’d never seen anything like this. None of the watching Terre looked anything but stunned."
"Stand still, come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador."