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Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
I still don’t understand. And now that she’s dead, I’m not even sure I ever will. But I must try because I need to understand myself, and she is part of me. I wish that she weren’t, but she is. In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.
She had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money, and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father’s writings.
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive.
All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.
His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.
Back then, since I was the oldest, I was held responsible for their behavior. I had to control them even though I couldn’t escape their pain.
As I was born, she died. Before that, for two years, she took the popular “smart drug” of her time. It was a new prescription medicine called Paracetco, and it was doing wonders for people who had Alzheimer’s disease. It stopped the deterioration of their intellectual function and enabled them to make excellent use of whatever memory and thinking ability they had left. It also boosted the performance of ordinary, healthy young people.
For the kingdom of Heaven is as a man traveling into a far country who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto One he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.’”
I could quote the parable that he was reading now, the parable of the talents.
Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made them another five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained another two. But he that had received one went out and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.’”
“Those are our talents,” he would say as my brothers’ eyes glazed over and even I tried not to sigh. “God has given them to us, and he’ll judge us according to how we use them.”
Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at
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Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear.
“Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”
He has a voice that’s a whole-body experience,
It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for.
Chaos Is God’s most dangerous face— Amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape Chaos— Shape God. Act.
They vanished into their hills and increased their numbers by birth, by adoption of orphans, and by conversion of needy adults.
They look at their children—Alan has four kids, too—and they’re afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness.
And they’re tired. There are millions of people like them—people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!
Peace is dangerous because it encourages complacency and carelessness—which also kills sooner or later.
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.
Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor.
Well, I never thought you were stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid. That being the case, I have a proposition for you.”
Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful Positive obsession Blunts pain, Diverts rage, And engages each of us In the greatest, The most intense Of our chosen struggles
We all need dreams—our fantasies—to sustain us through hard times. There’s no harm in that as long as we don’t begin to mistake our fantasies for reality as she did.
It promises its people immortality only through their children, their work, and their memories.
sharing an almost nineteenth-century existence.
Not that I claim to know what would be enough. The thing that I want to build is so damned new and so vast! I not only don’t know how to build it, but I’m not even sure what it will look like when I have built it. I’m just feeling my way, using whatever I can do, whatever I can learn to take one more step forward.
Alaska is a more popular destination than ever these days.
People struggled toward it, hoping for a still-civilized place of jobs, peace, room to raise their children in safety, and a return to the mythical golden-age world of the mid-twentieth century.
It was a familiar sort of story—horrible and ordinary.
when I was a boy.
Now we are in the middle of the change. We still get a few substantial fall and winter
it offered immediate rewards. Here was real community. Here was at least a semblance of security. Here was the comfort of ritual and routine and the emotional satisfaction of belonging to a “team” that stood together to meet challenge when challenge came.
create family bonds that take in more than the usual godparent-godchild relationship.
“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. Civilization provides ways of combining the information, experience, and creativity of the many to achieve ongoing group adaptability.”
I do think it’s wise, but I didn’t say so. Bankole still can’t see this place as anything more than a temporary stop on the way to a “real” home in a “real” town—that is, an already established town. I don’t know how long it will take for him to see that what we’re building here is as real and at least as important as anything he’s likely to find in a town that’s been around for a century or two.
I don’t know how to do it. That scares me to death sometimes—always feeling driven to do something I don’t know how to do. But I’m learning as I go along. And I’ve learned that I have to be careful how I talk about all this, even to Acorn. Bankole isn’t the only one of us who doesn’t see the possibility of doing anything he hasn’t seen done by others. And… although Bankole would never say this, I suspect that somewhere inside himself, he believes that large, important things are done only by powerful people in high positions far away from here. Therefore, what we do is, by definition, small
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What I’m trying to do isn’t quite normal. It’s been done. New belief systems have been introduced. But there’s no standard way of introducing them—no way that can be depended on to work. What I’m trying to do is, I’m afraid, a crazy, difficult, dangerous undertaking. Best to talk about it only a little bit at a time.
One of the first duties of Earthseed is to learn and then to teach.”
People are still impressed, even intimidated, by bound, official-looking books. Verses, handwritten or printed out on sheets of paper just don’t grab them the way a book does. Even people who can’t read are impressed by books. The idea seems to be, “If it’s in a book, maybe it’s true,” or even, “If it’s in a book, it must be true.”
Praying does work. Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.”
Once he’s made everyone who isn’t like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn’t cause. That’s easier than trying to fix the problems.”
Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.
