Downbelow Station Quotes

“One tribe moves out and one tribe stays. History broadens, and philosophy shifts, develops a rift, splits one population from the other . . . and a schism happens, minor or major. It’s the way humankind has always proliferated. We go over the next hill, live a few hundred years, change our languages to accommodate things we never saw before—and before we know it, our cousins think we have an accent. Or we think they have a strange attitude. And we don’t really understand our cousins any longer.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about. Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues; no pictures, no news; no news, no event; no great sympathy on the part of the public nor sustained interest from the media: safe politics for the Company.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“The worst atrocities began with half-measures, with apologies, compromising with the wrong side, shrinking from what had to be done.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“A bizarre hysteria, perhaps, that point which many reached here, when anger was all that mattered. It led to self-destruction.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years… but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“They most frightened him, the young, the mad-eyed, the too-same young ones. Fanatic, because they knew only what was poured into their heads. Put in on tape, likely, beyond reason. Don’t talk with them, he had warned his companions. Do whatever they ask and make your arguments only to their superiors.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“These folk had an utter lack of respect for diplomatic conventions . . . typical, Ayres thought, of the situation, of authority upheld by rifle-bearing juveniles with mad eyes and ready recitations of regulations.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“You don’t get much view on a ship, Elene had said once, trying to explain to him. Not what you’d think. It’s the being there; the working of it; the feel of moving through what could surprise you at any moment. It’s being a dust speck in that scale and pushing your way through all that Empty on your own terms, that no world can do and nothing spinning around one. It’s doing that, and knowing all the time old goblin Deep is just the other side of the metal you’re leaning on. You stationers like your illusions. And world folk, blue-skyers, don’t even know what real is.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station

“It’s the being there; the working of it; the feel of moving through what could surprise you at any moment. It’s being a dust speck in that scale and pushing your way through all that Empty on your own terms, that no world can do and nothing spinning around one.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station