Five Ways to Forgiveness (Hainish Cycle, #7)
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between September 1 - September 19, 2025
1%
Flag icon
What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.
The Book Eclectic
A lesson stillto be learned
1%
Flag icon
feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all.
1%
Flag icon
Their passion was trapped in the hatred of the old.
3%
Flag icon
always there was a war to be fought in the name of Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord.
5%
Flag icon
She felt pleased with him and with herself.
5%
Flag icon
pleased with herself, her decisiveness, her unanswerability.
6%
Flag icon
He has said that before, Yoss thought. It has become his stock answer, his standard myth.
6%
Flag icon
Enar had taken up his sword to kill his Elder Brother on that battlefield, to keep him from becoming Lord of the World. And Kamye had told him that the sword he held was his own death; that there is no lordship and no freedom in life, only in the letting go of life, of longing, of desire.
9%
Flag icon
I want a wood fire, Yoss thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-telling fire,
17%
Flag icon
Defeats were minimised, losses were not made up, skimmers, pods, weapons, men were not replaced. By the end of Teyeo’s seventh year, the Army on Yeowe had been essentially written off by its government.
17%
Flag icon
finally began to bring their soldiers home.
17%
Flag icon
Why had they been left there to be hunted down and slaughtered? Why had the government not sent them reinforcements? The questions had not been worth asking then, they were not worth asking now. They had only one answer: We do what they ask us to do, and we don’t complain.
17%
Flag icon
We don’t fight wars. This is a new age.
17%
Flag icon
It seemed that to be a soldier now was a disgrace.
21%
Flag icon
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known who was neither owned nor owner. That is freedom. That is freedom. I wonder if you know it?”
The Book Eclectic
Entitlement
21%
Flag icon
something in his voice she had not heard before.
The Book Eclectic
The simple past, not the present perfect
21%
Flag icon
“Because you’re free you can be honest,”
21%
Flag icon
“It has been a taste of freedom to know you,”
21%
Flag icon
what she now, whatever his skill and tenderness, had to see was his job.
31%
Flag icon
he had held fast to the one noble thing.
The Book Eclectic
Forgiveness
31%
Flag icon
“If you know who your people are, you know who you are,” said Havzhiva’s father, Granite.
32%
Flag icon
“Wealth can’t stop,” Granite said to Havzhiva. “It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped—that’s a heart attack. You die.”
32%
Flag icon
Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one’s gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine.
32%
Flag icon
their people and their lineage did. They learned what people needed to learn, and lived their knowledge. “People have to learn to be human,” his father said.
32%
Flag icon
There were things one could do and things one could not do; one did those things for people and people did those things for one.
34%
Flag icon
You were born what you were. You were what you were born.
The Book Eclectic
Ironic in this predetermined and cokdified ste
34%
Flag icon
Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.
35%
Flag icon
“There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.”
35%
Flag icon
‘To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.”
35%
Flag icon
answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods.
36%
Flag icon
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
37%
Flag icon
Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned.
37%
Flag icon
There’s more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians.
37%
Flag icon
“You will think there are no rules,” she said. “There are always rules.”
38%
Flag icon
Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust.
39%
Flag icon
There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.
39%
Flag icon
the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.
42%
Flag icon
you don’t change a mind with a gun.
43%
Flag icon
insuperably
46%
Flag icon
“You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.”
47%
Flag icon
“No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”
48%
Flag icon
This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don’t underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up—”
48%
Flag icon
My job was acceptance. To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”
48%
Flag icon
What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules—a pattern that makes sense?”
53%
Flag icon
can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
57%
Flag icon
There was anger in me now. I had not felt anger while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no use for it. I lived with it in silence.
57%
Flag icon
What I liked of myself was my hands, clever at their work, and my head, not clever at learning, but still learning, no matter how long it took.
57%
Flag icon
In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.
58%
Flag icon
They don’t need guns if they own our minds.”