More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
<A man pretends,> Yskandr murmured. <A barbarian pretends that civilization might grow in the small hours of the night, between two people.>
she was pretty sure the kiosk selling bottled beverages didn’t mean to have their Teixcalaanli sign read HERE IS PORKS! unless she had severely misunderstood both the nature of bottled beverages and Station animal husbandry capabilities.
Three Seagrass had thought, as a very frustrated and no longer even slightly drunk cadet, that those writers were absurdly old-fashioned. What citizen of the Empire couldn’t hold their own against the paltry cultural contamination of a nonimperial civilization? And anyone who fucked someone with a social disease had bigger problems than irreversible contamination. Problems like fucking someone who came from a planet without adequate public health.
“On your Station you don’t spend hours talking to apparently infectious aliens before taking new lovers, unless I am entirely wrong about your native culture.”
It was that if she was going to do anything she was going to do it right. She’d been like that her whole life. The thing, entire, or not at all.
Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.
