Speaker for the Dead (Ender Quintet Book 2)

by Orson Scott Card

“The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling—Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic främling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.”

“Anticipated self-pity is what I’m feeling, about pains that haven’t even arrived.”

“And humans simply aren’t part of the pattern of tree-worship. Well, that’s likely enough. Except that I’ve found that rituals and myths don’t come from nowhere. There’s usually some reason for it that’s tied to the survival of the community.”

Ye Must Love Everyone So That God Will Love You. He had chosen the name carefully when he and his fiancée joined the order, for he knew that his greatest weakness was anger and impatience with stupidity.

Some sort of rigid hierarchy always emerged as the conservative force in a community, maintaining its identity despite the constant variations and changes that beset it. If there were no powerful advocate of orthodoxy, the community would inevitably disintegrate. A powerful orthodoxy is annoying, but essential to the community. Hadn’t Valentine written about this in her book on Zanzibar? She compared the priestly class to the skeleton of vertebrates—

For the first time in years he was admitting to himself the inborn hunger of every living organism to reproduce itself.

“Will he always come between us?” “Yes,” said Ela. “Like a bridge he’ll come between us, not a wall.”