Speaker for the Dead Quotes

“For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.”

“I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.”

“She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but forbidden to reach for it.”

“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to…a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”

“Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”

“Speaker, I know you’re thinking that we’re afraid of the piggies. And perhaps some of us are. But the feeling most of us have, most of the time, isn’t fear at all. It’s hatred. Loathing.”