Else > Else's Quotes

“There’s a wound in you, and the tables, the dice, the cards—they feel like medicine. They soothe you, put you right for a time. But they’re poison, Jesper. Every time you play, you take another sip. You have to find some other way to heal that part of yourself.” She laid her hand on his chest. “Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“What if it’s enough to just be…”

Us, Dex knew Mosscap meant, though the robot didn’t finish.”
― Becky Chambers

“The passageway leads to a spiraling staircase. Back on Earth I wouldn’t be able to climb anything so steep. But ability is contextual. Whatever we’re able to do—and whatever meaning we make of that—changes from one environment to another. We make all of our own environments now. To design a place that others can’t possibly move through or inhabit is the same as raising up a drawbridge, dropping down a toothy portcullis, or punching a row of murder holes through a ceiling. It writes down a clear, solid message in the language of architecture: You are not welcome here. You don’t even have the right to exist here. Please cease to exist as soon as possible.
That’s what the stairs would have said to me, back on Earth. But we aren’t on Earth. I bound up that staircase, which cannot object.”
― William Alexander, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Humans’ preoccupation with ‘being happy’ was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Have you been in Sissix’s room yet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Okay, well, on her wall, there’s this big fancy frame with a mess of Aandrisk feathers hanging from it. Every Aandrisk’s got one, as far as I know. See, if you’re an Aandrisk and somebody really touches your life in some way, you give that person one of your feathers. And then you keep the feathers you get from others as a symbol of how many paths you’ve crossed. Having a lot of feathers on your wall shows that you’ve had an impact on a lot of people. That’s a pretty big life priority for most Aandrisks.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to BE itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“So, tattooing . . . you’ve got a picture in your mind, then you put it on your body. You make a hazy imagining into a tangible part of you. Or, to flip it around, you want a reminder of something, so you put it on your body, where it’s a real, touchable thing. You see the thing on your body, you remember it in your mind, then you touch it on your body, you remember why you got it, what you were feeling then, and so on, and so on. It’s a re-enforcing circle. You’re reminded that all these separate pieces are part of the whole that comprises you.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“Are we going for an anchor or a compass? A memory to ground you, or a spark to guide you forward?”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone. Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“The room is warm and smells like dust, and just the presence of so many books makes it easier to breathe. It’s remarkable how being around books, even those you’ve never read, can have a calming effect, like walking into a crowded party and finding it full of people you know.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“I don’t get it.’
‘You don’t have to. People don’t exist for us to get”
― Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension

“You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“And thank God, because I don't want simple. I do not want easy or small or uncomplicated. I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I'm learning there is no one way for life to be lived, no one way to be strong or brave or kind or good. Rather there are many people doing the best they can with the heart they are given and the hand they are dealt. Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“There are many things that make this book fiction, but the roles women play within it are not. The women of the eighteenth century were met with opposition. They had to fight endlessly. Their work was silenced, their contributions ignored, and many of their stories are forgotten today.
Nevertheless, they persisted.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“Haven't you always been more than yourself? Haven't we all? We are none of us just one thing.”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale

“It's my whole childhood, being sneered at by watery girls for a joke I didn't understand because I was reading books they could never understand”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“In the company of women like this— sharp-edged as raw diamonds but with soft hands and hearts, not strong in spite of anything but powerful because of everything— I feel invincible. Every chink and rut and battering wind has made us tough and brave and impossible to strike down. We are mountains— or perhaps temples, with foundations that could outlast time itself.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“Percy sees me off at the door with more affirming words but no hug or even a pat upon the shoulder. Thank god for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.”
― Mackenzi Lee , The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“All those thing women are made to believe they are strange for harboring in their hearts. And I want to surround myself with those same strange, wicked women who throw themselves open to all the wondrous things the world has to offer.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

“Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale

“The world is seldom so simple that it hinges on us alone.”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale

“Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“It looked like our gods, to me--not literally, no the way they are depicted in statues, but the vibrant space between them, where Necessity is Chance and Chance flows into Necessity. The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it and all of it is you.”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale

“They were all so nice and it was just excruciating. I was never taking off the helmet again. I can't do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“We would plan and negotiate and build our own way forward”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale