"The Sparrow"

[fiefoe]

The ending delivered some interesting twists. (Gardens can be fatal.) So on balance I'm glad that I made it through the end of the book. (Things in italics are the annoying/wrong bits.)

• If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God."
• "feo, fuerte y formal." He looked to see if the Father General had enough Spanish. "Ugly, strong and serious. The macho ideal.
• He offered us hasta’akala. He took me to the garden and showed me the ivy and I didn’t make the connection.
• Supaari had found over the years, was that Jana’ata couldn’t see well in redlight but Runa could. It imposed a secrecy that his competitors, sleeping away the red and black hours, didn’t even suspect.
• He knew he was getting esters and aldehydes, and the smell of burnt sugars certainly, but the scent was staggeringly complex. All this from a few small brown objects, oval, incised with a longitudinal line.
• "it seems to me that sainthood, like genius, is rooted in a sort of inspired persistence."
• Why, he had once wondered, would a perfect God create the universe? To be generous with it, he believed now.
• eyes alight   / God is a complex personality.
• There are few things quite as charming as the inept functioning of an immature nervous system."
• they were instead oddly careful with him, as though he were pregnant—that was the only parallel that came to mind.
• Thus, the princely thirds of Rakhat were the volatile elements, the free radicals of Jana’ata high culture, just as bourgeois thirds like Supaari VaGayjur formed the striving, bustling commercial element of Jana’ata society.
• And, overlaying all, the tenuous odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers of Emilio Sandoz.
• "Dinosaur game?" Emilio asked, breaking his silence for the first time. "One of the best guesses about the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs was that a good-sized asteroid smashed into Earth,"
• A time to weigh the extraordinary and spiritual and fathomless beauty that God had shown him against the ordinary and worldly and incalculable sweetness of human love and family.
• On Rakhat, in my opinion, this competition resulted in the evolution of two sentient species." "Are you saying that the Runa were the prey?" John asked, horrified.
• Because the VaKashani were hosts to the foreign delegation and thus entitled to a percentage of Supaari’s profit, the village would move nearly a year ahead of schedule closer to breeding rights.
• Galatna had an overevolved look, like that of classical Chinese architecture, as though it had been worked on too long, layered and added to more than was strictly good for it.
• "It was the gardens." Knowing that he was being addressed directly for some reason but unable to see why, Voelker shook his head. "I’m sorry. I don’t follow." "The mistake. What you’ve been waiting for. The fatal error."
• the result of a mating is not up to standard, the offspring is removed as soon as possible, before an attachment can be formed. A sort of veal, one might say."
• used the word, poacher. I simply didn’t realize that it implied the existence of legal use of the meat."
• It was Giuliani’s voice. "It is hard to think the unthinkable. They were offering you the meat of the innocents."
• The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself.
• "But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.
• There’s a certain kind of serenity that comes from knowing that the ethics you draw on have been tested and re-tested by one thousand generations in every possible cultural and ethical climate
• The humans get into trouble because they fail to understand how Rakhat society controls reproduction.