Arkady Martine > Quotes

“Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Nothing touched by Empire stays clean.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“She’s a barbarian, but don’t hold it against her. She’s brilliant.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you're hanging in Lsel Station's Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren't even in my language―>
Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.

We felt that way.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.” “Are you Yskandr, or are you Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and that did seem to be the crux of it: Was she Yskandr, without him? Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Three Seagrass had taken her hands away from her face, and the expression which was growing there was one that Mahit had seen before: it was Three Seagrass focusing inward, preparing to bend the universe around her will, because all other options were untenable.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“She had begun petting the Kauraanian kitten, and it purred like it wanted to be a starship engine when it grew up.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“The adjutant, Twenty Cicada, made an entirely remarkable noise, like he’d drowned a laugh and swallowed its corpse.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“IN Teixcalaan, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments. Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jumpgates and two weeks’ sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capital, about to turn around and come home. The holograph is a cartographer’s version of serenity: all these glitter-pricked lights are planetary systems, and all of them are ours. This scene—some captain staring out at the holograph re-creation of empire, past the demarcated edge of the world—pick a border, pick a spoke of that great wheel that is Teixcalaan’s vision of itself, and find it repeated: a hundred such captains, a hundred such holographs.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire