Shadow of the Hegemon (Shadow, #2)

by Orson Scott Card

It was a strange, exhilarating feeling to be with people who didn’t want anything from you except your happiness, who were glad just to have you around.

He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.

To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

You keep thinking that death is the most terrible thing that can happen to a person, but to God, death just means you’re coming home a few moments ahead of schedule. To God, the dreadful outcome of a human life is when that person embraces sin and rejects the joy that God offers. So of all the millions who might die in a war, each individual life is tragic only if it ends in sin.”

I don’t know a soul who doesn’t maintain two separate lists of doctrines—the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by. I’m simply one of the rare ones who knows the difference.

Because human beings are just machines, Petra knew that, machines that do what you want them to do, if you only know the levers to pull. And no matter how complex people might seem, if you just cut them off from the network of people who give shape to their personality, the communities that form their identity, they’ll be reduced to that set of levers. Doesn’t matter how hard they resist, or how well they know they’re being manipulated. Eventually, if you take the time, you can play them like a piano, every note right where you expect it.

“For a nun, you seem to know a lot about this.” “I wasn’t born a nun.” “But you were born a girl.” “And no one is a better observer of the folkways of the adolescent male than the adolescent female.”

“Sometimes people with the least that is worth stealing are the most concerned with giving the appearance of having great treasures hidden away.”

“It isn’t lying to tell a bureaucrat whatever story it takes to get him to do his job properly.”

“People who understand the purpose of the rules don’t become bureaucrats,”

All the other things—victories, achievements, honors, causes—they bring only momentary flashes of pleasure. But binding yourself to another person and to the children you make together, that’s life. And you can’t do it if your life is centered on your ambitions. You’ll never be happy. It will never be enough, even if you rule the world.”

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said—to the consternation of her family—What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies. To have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

Like human beings. DNA that differed by only the tiniest amounts from person to person, and yet those differences giving rise to saints and monsters, fools and geniuses, builders and wreckers, lovers and takers.

“Nothing made him that way,” said Bean. “No matter what terrible things happened in his life, no matter what dreadful hungers rose up from his soul, he chose to act on those desires, he chose to do the things he did. He’s responsible for his own actions, and no one else. Not even those who saved his life.”