Foreigner

1) "The foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream-bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the o' o' o' click of a small creature somewhere in the brush."

2) "'So what more, paidhi? Rockets to the moons? Travel amongst the stars?'
A far more dangerous topic. 'I'd like, yes, to see atevi at least reach that threshold in my lifetime. Nai-ji, so much is possible from there. So much you could do then. But we aren't sure of the changes that would make, and I want to understand what would result. I want to give good advice. That's my job, nai-ji.' He had never himself seen it so clearly, until now. 'We're at the edge of space. And so much changes once you can look down on the world.'
'What changes?'
One more dangerous question, this one cultural and philosophical. He looked outward, at the lake, the whole world seeming to lie below the path they rode.
'Height changes your perspective, nai-ji. We see three provinces from here. But my eye can't see the treaty-boundaries.'
'Mine can. That mountain ridge. The river. They're quite evident.'
'But were this mountain as high as the great moon, nai-ji, and if you were born on this very high mountain, would you see the lines? Or, if you saw them, would they mean to you what they mean to people born on the plain, these distant, invisible lines?'"

3) "He'd believed the game in the cellar, when they'd put the gun to his head---they'd made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he'd have thought he'd think of Barb, he'd have thought he'd think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn't. They'd made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn't discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he'd been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine---just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family's clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they'd pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity---"

According to my records, I read this in 1996, a week after reading Cyteen. Just re-read it for the first time since, and wow, what an excellent book. I was particularly struck by the two introductory chapters, each essentially framing short stories for the novel, and how rich a backstory and society Cherryh paints with them, accomplishing more than many average SF books do. And then there's the main story, which I think I appreciated and followed much more this time around.

Back in 1996, I didn't like the aliens, especially as shown on the cover,
and it was all confusing. (It still is, but in a good way.) I had expected to sort of slog through this reread, on my way to the 10 (?!) sequels that have been written since. Instead, wow, I have nearly as much Cherryh as I've read before ahead of me.

(This wasn't as much a shock as rereading 40,000 and having it go from 2 to 4 stars, but I clearly missed a lot of Cherryh's depth the first time around.)