Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.

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 have an old brain but a terrific memory.

I don't want to ever, ever give that kind of pain to one living mortal. And I will not give that thought power in my life. That's my practice.

The only thing that I have done that is not mitigated by luck, diminished by good fortune, is that I persisted, and other people gave up.

All things are lessons that God would have us learn.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

Look at World War II, at Hitler's cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.

I'm not really a foodie; I could eat the same thing every night, and I go to restaurants that I can walk to.

There is hardly any man so strict as not to vary a little from truth when he is to make an excuse.

Transformation is something I cannot explain - too much analysis might destroy it.

I would not want to live in a country that would have me as a leader in any sort of political bent.