If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good o… - Orson Scott Card

“We don’t go to Fort Chicago,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We go to the holy place.”
“A church?” asked Alvin.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed. “You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn’t matter—nothing and nowhere.”
“Well what does make a place holy?” asked Alvin.
“Because that’s where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.”

How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?

Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.