“Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference. I’m not only speaking of the small actions that, cumulatively, over time, or in great numbers, alter the course of events in ways too chaotic or subtle to trace ... if everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimetre, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“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?”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“...it’s so easy, isn’t it, to decide the people you’re fighting aren’t really human. Or maybe you have to do it, to be able to kill them.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“If that’s what you’re willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love?”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“I didn't get where I am by having reasonable goals”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“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.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“We have a saying, where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“In that case,” I said, “go fuck yourself.” Which she could actually, literally do, in fact.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren't quite so simple.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“If you're going to do something that crazy, save it for when it'll make a difference, Lieutenant Skaaiat had said, and I had agreed. I still agree.
The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“You never knelt to get anywhere. You are where you are because you're fucking capable, and willing to risk everything to do right, and I'll never be half what you are even if I tried my whole life, and I was walking around thinking I was better than you, even half dead and no use to anyone, because my family is old, because I was born better.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Nearly everywhere I've been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity's original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn't, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is part of an intricate whole and to understand why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as “just a coincidence.” Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Do you still think Mianaai controls the Radchaai through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most Radchaai, like people most places I have been, do what they’re supposed to because they believe it’s the right thing to do. No one likes killing people.”
Strigan made a sardonic noise "No one?"
"Not many," I amended. "Not enough to fill the Radch's warships".”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. 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? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that’s only hindsight. The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I–Justice of Toren might not also be I–One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk’s memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt. The moment I—“I”—was surprised by it.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
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“I like the idea of it. Just look at the world around you. Wars, terror, starvation, poverty, disease. Take the Middle East conflict, for example. An area on earth that contains so much hatred, so many frustrations, that a bomber is always lurking around the next corner, and where checkpoints and walls have become a permanent part of daily life. When I look at such a world from here in my little Danish ivory tower, it's a very appealing idea that there might exist at least--at the very least--36 righteous people on this earth. Small human pillars to ensure that we maintain a minimum of kindness and righteousness.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“This is what I know about love, That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One chooses either to care more or to care less. Once the choice is to care less, then there is no stopping the momentum of goodbye. Each loved thing slips away. There is no stopping it.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“God, this kiss. It was the kind she’d remember forever, that would invade her dreams and haunt her in quiet moments. The kind her older self could look back on and know, once, she’d really lived. The kind that, no matter what, she could never, ever regret.”
― Laura Kaye, quote from Hard as It Gets
“But pride carries its banner to the last; and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second; and so on till death.”
― Helen Hunt Jackson, quote from Ramona
“I love you. I’m addicted to you. Sometimes that love borders on toxic.”
― Angie McKeon, quote from Against All Odds
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