There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.
If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
There are so many interesting times we could have visited.
It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.
Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.
Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.
There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn’t quite break.
First learning, then proving I’d learned. Knowing and using the knowledge aren’t the same thing.
Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.
Read every day and learn from what you read.
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
That’s what Humans are, too, don’t forget. People who poison each other, then disclaim all responsibility.
She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.
All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.
The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise – Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.
Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape. But you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures.