Previous
Dr. Gary Donnelly
A member of the U.S. military, Colonel Weber recruits the linguist Dr. Louise Banks to learn the alien heptapods’ language. Once he has recruited Louise, he oversees the attempts she and Dr. Gary Donnelly make to communicate with and learn from the heptapods. From the beginning, Colonel Weber suspects the heptapods of sinister motives in visiting Earth. He pressures Louise to teach the heptapods as little about human language and technology as possible, despite the problems this attitude causes her as she tries to understand the heptapods. Moreover, he seems determined to extract as much technological information from the heptapods as he can while giving as little as possible in return. Thus Colonel Weber represents how prejudice toward outsiders can impede understanding.
Colonel Weber Quotes in Story of Your Life
The Story of Your Life quotes below are all either spoken by Colonel Weber or refer to Colonel Weber. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Story of Your Life
Quotes
Colonel Weber frowned. “You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts.”
“I doubt it. They’d need instructional material specifically designed to teach human languages to nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human. If they had either of those, they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise, they wouldn’t have a starting point.”
The colonel clearly found this interesting; evidently his philosophy was, the less the aliens knew, the better. Gary Donnelly read the colonel’s expression too and rolled his eyes. I suppressed a smile.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Story of Your Life LitChart as a printable PDF.
Colonel Weber Quotes in Story of Your Life
The Story of Your Life quotes below are all either spoken by Colonel Weber or refer to Colonel Weber. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Story of Your Life
Quotes
Colonel Weber frowned. “You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts.”
“I doubt it. They’d need instructional material specifically designed to teach human languages to nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human. If they had either of those, they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise, they wouldn’t have a starting point.”
The colonel clearly found this interesting; evidently his philosophy was, the less the aliens knew, the better. Gary Donnelly read the colonel’s expression too and rolled his eyes. I suppressed a smile.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
