Yoon Ha Lee > Quotes

“The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity's far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“But then, war is about taking the future away from people.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“The silence could have swallowed a star.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“According to the Shuos," Jedao said, "games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don't fold.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“There are too many shapes of love to be counted. One of them is forgiveness.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“Even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“I wish I knew I was doing this right," Cheris said, "but there's nothing to it but to move forward."

"The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still," Jedao said. "It's better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than freeze.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“Remember that despite the fact that I'm a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn't me.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth. What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts. Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Taking away people's names denied their power, a lesson Cheris tried not to think about.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“I have loved you in your own language, Kaela thought as she picked up her blades, so softly that we never knew it. Let your language be mine; let me cast my own shadows.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Schrödinger's cat has far more than nine lives, and far fewer. All of us are unknowing cats, alive and dead at once, and of all the might-have-beens in between, we record only one.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“A cat wriggled in Zehun’s arms: the orange tabby Jienji, who, like all of Zehun’s cats, was named after a notorious Shuos assassin. Even someone who liked cats as much as Zehun did was unlikely to run out of names anytime soon.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem

“You always have a choice," Jedao said. "It's just that most of them are bad.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“I once had someone swerve her tank out of our column and straight into a house. With a very large basement. Because she was too sleep-deprived to think. It's funny now, but it wasn't funny then. – Oh, who am I kidding, it was HILARIOUS, even if it was kind of a disaster. I laughed so hard my aide almost shot me.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“In some universes, all possible pasts funnel towards a single fixed ending, Ω.

It you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon, If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“In Inesser’s experience, being distracted by shooting pains in your ass never improved your decision-making ability.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun

“This time they're making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Jebi was torn between saying 'You are embarrassing me' and 'I am going to take up my brush and make a painting of you that they will talk about for the next 10,000 years'. They said neither.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant