Ada Palmer > Quotes

“Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“I wanted it so much. So much sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe. Sometimes I would cry, not because I was sad, but because it hurt, physical pain from the intensity of wanting something so much. I'm a good student of philosophy, I know my Stoics, Cynics, their advice, that, when a desire is so intense it hurts you, the healthy path is to detach, unwant it, let it go. The healthy thing for the self. But there are a lot of reasons one can want to be an author: acclaim, wealth, self-respect, finding a community, the finite immortality of name in print, so many more. But I wanted it to add my voice to the Great Conversation, to reply to Diderot, Voltaire, Osamu Tezuka, and Alfred Bester, so people would read my books and think new things, and make new things from those thoughts, my little contribution to the path which flows from Gilgamesh and Homer to the stars. And that isn't just for me. It's for you. Which means it was the right choice to hang on to the desire, even when it hurt so much.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Books, even made-up stories, can't all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn't always happy.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater. Or does that past-tainted inner part of you—the part that still parses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’—still think that happiness alone is not achievement without legacy? Diogenes has a legacy. Diogenes ruled nothing, wrote nothing, taught nothing except by the example of his life to passersby, but, so impressed were those bypassers, that, after the better part of three millennia, we still know this about him.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“Celibacy is the most extreme of sexual perversions, after all.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“Every day you step into my life, you make it brighter, and if you left the world, something in me would starve for you forever, as when some barrier rises to shade a plant, which still has light enough to grow some but will never again taste the unbroken sun.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Child: "The Major and the soldiers and Mycroft told me what war is like. They say it's the second worst thing in the world."
Man: "That's an interesting definition. What did they say is the worst thing?"
Child: "Not having anything worth fighting for in the first place.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Except ants" is Mushi's motto. Humanity is forever boasting of its 'unique' achievements: "Humans are the only creatures who build cities, use agriculture, domesticate animals, have nations and alliances, practice slavery, make war, make peace; these wonders make us stand alone above all other creatures, in glory and in crime." But then Mushi corrects, "Except ants.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“If history is written by winners, fiction like that is written by bystanders trying to guess what the victims would have said if they’d survived.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“Now, the penis is round, and the anus is round, while the vagina’s opening is long and narrow; clearly then Nature designed the penis to fit into the anus, not into the vagina.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“It was an intense embrace, no awkwardness, no holding back, the kind of hug two people can only achieve after long intimacy, but anyone can give in an instant to a stuffed bear.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens—worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.”
― Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle

“The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.”
― Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle

“Heartless reality does not grant humans the lifespan necessary to master every specialty of science, so no one genius in his secret lab can really bring robots, mutants, and clones into the world at his mad whim--it takes a team, masses of funds, and decades. But one man can love all sciences, even if he cannot wield them, and he can inspire children with the model of the mad genius, even if he cannot live it.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“We all imagine happy endings to such books, pick out the page, the paragraph, in which we would step in and pluck the innocents to safety.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit—Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians. It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.”
― Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle

“Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours mine, doesn't mean we can't still do real good. We're still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That's real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren't a negative number, they don't cancel out the good things we do now, don't make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don't take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Never create a personal enemy. Always keep layers of minions between yourself and someone you destroy, it’s safer that way.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“I could ask any contemporary here, ‘Are you a majority?’ and I know what he or she would answer: Of course not, Mycroft. I have a Hive, a race, a second language, a vocation and an avocation, hobbies of my own; add up my many strats and you will soon reduce me to a minority of one, and hence my happiness. I am unique, and proud of my uniqueness, and prouder still that, by being no majority, I ensure eternal peace. You lie, reader. There is one majority still entrenched in our commingled world, a great ‘us’ against a smaller ‘them.’ You will see it in time. I shall give only one hint—the deadliest majority is not something most of my contemporaries are, reader, it is something they are not. «”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“We discussed what we want from you now,...you who had power and used it to burn the world. You burned a lot. You didn't just burn trees and cities and each other. You burned our admiration for the governments we grew up respecting. You burned our sense of safety in your care. You burned our patience, our ability to believe that the great things in this world you promised to protect will still be there for us and future generations. You burned our trust as you misused the data and surveillance we let you collect, first for O.S. and the Canner Device, then for the war, its propaganda and its lies. You burned our self-trust, too, since we know we are infused with your values, values we thought made both you and us people who would never do what you just did. We have to be afraid of ourselves now, vigilant against what you've taught us to be, since now we know we are something to be afraid and ashamed of. And even if you didn't personally kill in the war, if you carried arms, if you participated, you helped burn what nothing can bring back. No sentence can repair any of that. So, we want you to repair what you can. That's our sentence. We want you to rebuild the cities, replant the trees, replace the art, relaunch the satellites, fix the bridges you can fix to make up for the ones you can't. We want you to rebuild the system, too, fixing the holes this has exposed and making more safeguards so no one can misuse the cars and data and surveillance and trackers and such again. We want you to build it all back but better than it was, and faster than any past war has rebuilt. You weren't as good at peace as you thought you were, but maybe you can be as good at rebuilding. Everyone, even Minors like Tribune MASON who took part, if in your heart you know you were complicit, then build back what you burned with your own hours, your own efforts, your own hands. That's our sentence.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Not the technical today that cold calendars count, but the shared today that text creates, the now when Martin wrote his words and the now in which we read them married across time’s diaspora.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning”
― Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle