"Almost every culture in the Thousand Cultures had some wisdom literature, and much of it was the same between any two cultures. . . . Cultures tend to be alike in much of what they think are the basic virtues, but one of the ones they are most alike in, though it rarely appears in their book of wisdom, is: Distrust strangers, fear foreigners, dread novelty."

“Brains don’t exactly run in that family—they sort of dribble slowly away.”

“Are you up to faking being sincere underneath faking being fake?”

“How he must have been astonished to see people behaving decently when what they believed was absolute anathema to him.”

“And just like this, all of a sudden, your people and mine will begin to talk?" "It only looks sudden from some places. Running off a cliff is sudden if you don't know it's there, even if you have been running toward it for days." "That's not a reassuring metaphor." "It isn't meant to be.”

“It's a good idea for diplomats to keep their word in small matters. It makes the later complete betrayals more of a surprise.”

“The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.”