Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

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.

Curiosity is the great motivator of an education. It’s the how of learning: how we go from not knowing something to knowing it inside and out.

The promises of prayer are extraordinary, but for prayer to work as God promises it to work, it must be purged of self and doubt.

Laziness always wins.

Real patriots ask questions.

A fact acquires its true and full value only through the idea which is developed from it.

Rakes are more suspicious than honest men.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

I just wanted to say things that women wanted to say, but were afraid to.

When I wrestled in College, my team was very good.

The hooves of the horse! Oh! witching and sweet is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet; no whisper of love, no trilling of bird, can stir me as hooves on the horse have stirred.