Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.

If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.

I may some day get a boyfriend and eventually a husband, but you will always be my first loves." -Sheetal, 14, Qatar

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.

It wasn't until I started writing that I found a whole new appreciation for reading.

You have only one life and it will soon be past, and only what's done for Christ will last.

If you want to change your art, change your habits.

My core beliefs revolve around the idea that we should live to the best of our abilities-we should live and let live.

I don't think my parents know what I do.

The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper.

I looked at my father and looked at those dry fields [in Malawi]. It was the future I couldn't accept.