Xenocide Quotes

Orson Scott Card, Xenocide.

Quotes

• "Think of it as if now was on the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an inflating sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing, popping up new universes all the time. Now think of the sphere as having an infinite radius."

"The surface would be completely flat" "Exactly." "And you could never go all the way around it." "That's right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes on the reality side. Now starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading in toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. When do you get to the first one?" "You don't. Not if you're traveling at a finite rate." "You don't reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you're starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away." "And that's where the universe began."

• "The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them."
• "Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely."
• "There can be no greater honor to a parent than to have a child who is greater."
• "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."
• "Soâ¦no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individualsâ"and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with."
• "When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesnât yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man."
• "So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people downâ¦A real god doesnât care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them."
• "Even if the vast majority of them (humans) are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of ten thousand ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. Thatâs how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories."
• "If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep a secret, than everyone is a fool."
• "You're only so sure you're right because they're so sure you're wrong."
• When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?"
• The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species with completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce.
• Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
• He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality.
• âIf you asked me to marry you all over again today, I'd say yes." âAnd if I'd only met you for the first time today, I'd ask." they had said the same words many, many times before. Yet they still smiled to hear them, because they were still true.
• Why did I come? I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself.
• She had passed his test. She had listened to him the way no one else did - without impatience, without finishing his sentences, without letting her gaze waver from his face. He had spoken to her, not with careful precision, but with great emotion... He could talk to this woman as naturally as he had ever talked to anyone before... Yes, she was opinionated, headstrong, bossy, and quick to reach conclusions. But she could also listen to an opposing view, change her mind when she needed to. She could listen, and so he could speak. Perhaps with her he could still be [himself].
• You've done all this thinking, you've seen all the possibilities for the future - good ones and bad ones alike - and yet the only ones you are willing to believe in, the imagined future that you seize upon as the foundation for all your moral judgments, is the only future in which everyone that you and I have ever loved and everything we'd ever hoped for must be obliterated.
• I choose to live in a universe that has some hope in it.
• "I desire [belief] enough to act as if I believed, maybe that's what faith is." âOr deliberate insanity."
• Before I do it, I have to know: is it a cause worth dying for?
• âHow can I figure out something that isn't just the logical conclusion of things that human beings have already figured out and written somewhere?" âYou think of things all the time" "Iâm trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that humans beings have never even tried to ask."
• She did not understand all of human nature, but [he] had taught her this: to stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make this person stop wanting to do it.
• That was how human beings satisfied their sense of responsibility - checking again even when they knew it was unnecessary
• I have too many secrets.
• I no longer tell anyone half of what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.
• Who is more cursed, the one who dies, unknowing until the very moment of his death or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?
• Maybe they didn't have to discuss things like this. Maybe they had spent so many years together that they knew how to cooperate so smooth things for other people without even thinking about it. Like actors who have performed the same roles together so often that they can improvise without the slightest confusion.
• I just don't what to face her again. Because I love her and I fear her. Because Iâm not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her.
• 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.
• Is it possible she had lost her soul inside his?
• No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought of what he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.
• She probably knew this, intellectually. But like all other human beings, she did not always act accordingly to her understanding. She had lost too many of the people that she loved; when she felt one more of them slipping away, her response was emotional, not intellectual. [he] had come into her life as a healer, a protector. It was his job to keep her from being afraid, and now she was afraid, and she was angry at him for having failed her.
• She might be protective and possessive with her children whom she thought of as needing her, but with the people she needed, she was the opposite. If she feared they would be taken from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them.
• âShe's too tough to die." âNo. She's so fragile right now that any blow might kill her. Not her body. Her - trust. Her hope. Don't give her any reason to think you're not with her, no matter what."
• He had no shred of fear or hatred in him.
• I really don't fear death. I never knew that.
• How do they manage it, these humans - beginning each time so innocently, yet always sending up with the most blood on their hands?
• We pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive.
• Don't call the speaker of truth a liar.
• You don't love him, you don't know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them too... You'll always feel betrayed. And because everybody dies, you'll always feel cheated. But you're the cheat... You're the one who uses our love for you to try to control us.
• 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.
• I thought: if I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to a mother to the children, their whole lives, what [he] was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.
• I blame on you only what you did. You started a fire on a hot, dry, windy day, despite all the warnings. I blame you for that, and if you hold yourself responsible for all the consequences of your own acts, then you are truly unworthy of human society and I hope you lose your freedom forever.
• The mob still had anger in it, some of them at least. Yet there were so many who were sick of it all, many who were already ashamed, already discovering in their hearts the terrible acts they had performed tonight, when their souls were given over to the will of the mob.
• We never forbid where we do not also have the power to prevent.
• If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy.
• Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.
• I think you were always pretending. Maybe you even fooled yourself. But one thing is certain. You were never an ordinary girl, and you could never had lead an ordinary life.
• âShe's just being a martyr" " no Iâm not Iâm being practical." âYou're being a fool."
• âYou don't know that you're right." âAnd you don't know that Iâm wrong." âItâs my life." âThe hell it is."
• Simple food but it tasted good and they were satisfied.
• If you treat me this way, then I will treat you like a great lord, and if you do not detect the irony in my actions, then who of the two of us is the fool?
• Some will hate you for telling them, but some will be glad for it.
• He laughs, you cry... What strange animals we are.
• âA male does his best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible." "Iâve done the wandering. Somehow I missed out on the copulating."
• In [his] mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense all because they canât all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they're needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgments, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. We knew everything there was to know before... Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.
• I looked for perfection, and I found something better.
• Sometimes I thought I was the only one who understood, even though half the time I didn't know what it was that I was understanding. I withdrew and watched, and because I didn't have any personal ego on the line... I could see more clearly than any of them.
• She thinks she's the only one in the would to ever suffer. I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she's so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously.
• I saw that he came in and listened and watched and understood who we were, each individual one of us. He tried to discover our need and then supply it. He took responsibility for other people and it didn't seem to matter to him how much it cost him.
• That means you, more than any of the others, stand to lose something truly beautiful and fine if we don't succeed in our endeavors.
• We realized that you were truly alive and beautiful in your perverse and tragic lonely way.
• Part of you but also not-you. Other. Outside but inside. Bound to you but free. It couldn't control you and you couldn't control it.
• You're making us very tired, with all your thinking of stupid imaginary impossible things.
• Failing to try and stop a murder that you might easily stop - how is that not murder?
• You both refuse to listen to anybody else. You know better about everything. And when you're both done, many many innocent people are dead.
• Only you have the power to kill me completely. Only you have the power to make it so my death means nothing, so that all my people die after me and there is no one left to remember. Why shouldn't I leave my testament with you alone? Only you will decide whether or not it has any worth.
• "Are you a beliver?" "Lets say Iâm a suspector. I suspect there may be someone who cares what happens to us. That's one step better than merely wishing. And one step below hoping."
• Us or them.
• Itâs the worst thing you'll ever do in your life, helping the people you love to do something that in your heart you know is deeply wrong.
• âHe's not as smart as he thinks he is" âYes he is. And if you doubt it, you're not as smart as you think you are."
• âWhen you don't understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them?" âYou don't take the blame. But you still take the responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused."
• "Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all"

Related topics

• Orson Scott Card
• Ender's Game
• Speaker for the Dead