Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.
Akin rested his chin on Iriarte’s shoulder and savored the strange pale scents – all pale now.
And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kissed.
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must.
Death Is a great Change – Is life’s greatest Change. We honor our beloved dead. As we mix their essence with the earth, We remember them, And within us, They live.
Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing. And.
I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.
Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is – what your genes say it is.
Grief hit like that. Something would remind us of the past, of home, of a person, and then we would remember that it was all gone. The person was dead or probably dead. Everything we’d known and treasured was gone.
Is a pea cut in half one wounded thing or two?
Lilith’s ability had run in her family, although neither she nor her ancestors had been able to control it. It had either lain dormant in them or come to life in insane, haphazard fashion and caused the growth of useless new tissue. New tissue gone obscenely wrong. Humans called this condition cancer. To them, it was a hated disease. To the Oankali, it was treasure. It was beauty beyond Human comprehension.
Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal – or dead.
Once people get the idea that it’s all right to take what you want and destroy the rest, who knows when they’ll stop.
The Self must create Its own reasons for being. To shape God, Shape Self.
Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.
Down on Earth,” she said carefully, “there are no people left to draw lines on maps and say which sides of those lines are the right sides. There is no government left. No human government, anyway.
Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.
God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there’s hope in understanding the nature of God – not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There’s comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There’s power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there’s no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that.
The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we don’t hear it.
I’ve noticed that people who have a little bit of power tend to use it.