Xenocide Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: Xenocide
Quotes of Book: Xenocide

Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
book-quote identity metamorphosis
Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
all the others knew that he had a mind, knew that he was capable of understanding ideas. What will new people think when they see me? They'll see a body that's already atrophying, hunched over; they'll see me walk with a shuffling gait; they'll watch me use my hands like paws, clutching a spoon like a three-year-old; they'll hear my thick, half-intelligible speech; and they'll assume, they'll know, that such a person cannot possibly understand anything complicated or difficult.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
All the way up to the surface, Valentine struggled to make sense of what had happened. She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
You can deny any sacrifice by claiming that it made the sufferer feel so good to do it that it really wasn't a sacrifice at all, but just another selfish act.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Hive Queen: So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.Human: You don't believe in God?Hive Queen: The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.Human: You evolved. We were created.Hive Queen: By a virus.Human: By a virus that God created in order to create us.Hive Queen: So you, too, are a believer.Human: I understand belief.Hive Queen: No-you desire belief.Human: I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that's what faith is.Hive Queen: Or deliberate insanity.
book-quote religion illusions
Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.
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Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Human beings remain grubs all the lives.
book-quote xenocide
Orson Scott Card _ Xenocide
Today, one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing?You answered...I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.You who speak languages, you are such liars.
book-quote liars obligation