“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.”

“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 n...”

“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...”

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

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

“A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”

“Prose divides shame into stations.”

“He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain...”