Embassytown

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.

BEFORE THE HUMANS came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.” He glanced at me. “We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.” Scile was reading nervously, quickly. “‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backwards. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together. “‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it. ‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.

Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

Oh, bullshit. This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think about how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretending to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact. Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we?

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

Its surface sheened with saft that evaporated out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing.

As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means." "Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded.

The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives. […] Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen. […] When they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got . . .” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language.

They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock.

You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.

Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.

Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.

Tell me," Bren said. "I thought you'd despaired." "I did, too." "What then? Tell me." I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.