Jordan > Jordan's Quotes

“You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“You know how it is; sometimes you just want to have a moment between yourself and a turtle and no one else.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“Well, that's the nice thing about trees," Mosscap put its hands on its hips as it looked around. "They're not going anywhere. You can take all the time you need to get to know them.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“I highly doubt many of them will feel that way, and anyway, you don’t have to worry about that.” “Why not?” Dex smiled reassuringly. “Because I’ll be with you the whole way.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“how any sighted individual’s perception of the world is entirely based on the way the structures in their eyes receive light.” Mosscap smiled at Dex. “I wish I could borrow your eyes for a day, see what that’s like.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“It's one thing to be told about the world that was. It's another to see a piece of it.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Not everything about the Wind was bad. Sometimes it blew through the little voids and crevices of the Statues and caused them to sing and whistle in surprising ways; I had never known the Statues to have voices before and it made me laugh for sheer delight.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I felt a surge of anger and for a moment I thought I would not tell him what I knew. But then I thought that it was unkind to punish him for something he cannot help. It is not his fault that he does not see things the way I do.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I think,” Juna says after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realise that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“My heart is a thin thing, these days - shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I wish I could understand experiences I’m incapable of having.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Then how,” Dex said, “how does the idea of maybe being meaningless sit well with you?” Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful,”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“And yet, if they were completely honest, the thing they had come to look forward to most was not the smiles nor the gifts nor the sense of work well done, but the part that came after all of that. The part when they returned to their wagon, shut themself inside, and spent a few precious, shapeless hours entirely alone. Why wasn't it enough?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“tapped its chest; the sound echoed lightly. “What’s the purpose of me?” “You’re here to learn about people.” “That’s something I’m doing. That’s not my reason for being. When I am done with this, I will do other things. I do not”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Are you afraid of that?” they asked. “Of death?” “Of course,” Mosscap said. “All conscious things are. Why else do snakes bite? Why do birds fly away? But that’s part of the lesson too, I think. It’s very odd, isn’t it? The thing every being fears most is the only thing that’s for certain? It seems almost cruel, to have that so…” “So baked in?” “Yes.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility