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“To you,” she breathed. “What do we contemplate?” It was her way of asking him to share his private thoughts with her. When others asked his private thoughts, he felt spied upon. But Jiang-qing asked only so that she could also think the same thought; it was part of their having become a single soul.
suzerainty,
If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.
laconic
The things I told you just now aren’t because I despair. I said all that because these things are possible. And because they’re possible we have to think of them so they don’t surprise us later. We have to think of them so that if the worst does come,
<Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved.>
“It’s nice to think that the metaphor of human unity might have a physical analogue,”
“If the Gangeans are right, then when a human being chooses to bond with another person, when he makes a commitment to a community, it is not just a social phenomenon. It’s a physical event as well. The philote, the smallest conceivable physical particle—if we can call something with no mass or inertia physical at all—responds to an act of the human will.”
“If the philotic ray twines in response to the human will, why couldn’t we suppose that all philotic twining is willed? Every particle, all of matter and energy, why couldn’t every observable phenomenon in the universe be the willing behavior of individuals?”
When a pequenino dies and passes into the third life, it’s his strong-willed philote that preserves his identity and passes it from the mammaloid corpse to the living tree.”
transcendental
“You’re welcome,” she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.
Let it be clumsily told and you will still love the tale, if you love truth. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you cannot deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.”
sacrosanct.
Someone once told me that the only teacher who’s worth anything to you is your enemy.”
approbation.
exalted
We spend our lives guessing at what’s going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we “understand.” Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.
malevolently
desiccated
loquacious,
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.
It was one of the quirks of her alien mind that disturbed Ender most. Ender had grown up in a culture that judged people’s maturity and social fitness by their ability to anticipate the results of their choices. In some ways the hive queen seemed markedly deficient in this area; for all her great wisdom and experience, she seemed as boldly and unjustifiably confident as a small child.
Could she keep a promise? If she failed to keep one, would she even realize what she had done?
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.
You see, they’re convinced that the descolada virus is the incarnation of the Holy Ghost. It makes a perverse kind of sense—since the Holy Ghost has always dwelt everywhere, in all God’s creations, it’s appropriate for its incarnation to be the descolada virus, which also penetrates into every part of every living thing.”
parochial.”
<Valentine explained something about some stories being true and others being truthful.
vehemence
petulance
cajole
after you’ve inadvertently killed a couple of people with your bare hands, either you learn to control your temper or you lose your humanity.”
“You decided it yourself, when you thought you could commit murder in order to win your argument,” said Ender. “And you brothers, you decided it when you didn’t stop him.”
these humans—beginning each time so innocently, yet always ending up with the most blood on their hands?>
“Rice?” asked Wang-mu. Qing-jao laughed. “No, Wang-mu. We are the most important Earthborn species on this world.”
illcontained
“And you don’t understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.”
“Mob physics, Grego. You never owned them. They owned you.
There are many different purposes in this world, many different causes of everything. Just because one cause you believed in turned out to be false doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes that can still be trusted.”
“You know what the descolada can do. You know what it will do. Withholding a decision is a decision.” “It’s not a decision. It’s not an action.”
“Failing to try to stop a murder that you might easily stop—how is that not murder?”
