“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.”

“Sometimes translation stops you understanding.”

“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...”

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

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

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

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.”

“We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arri...”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”