Enosh

“In a thousand years, Lieutenant, nothing you care about will matter. Not even to you—you’ll be dead. So will I, and no one alive will care. Maybe—just maybe—someone will remember our names. More likely those names will be engraved on some dusty memorial pin at the bottom of an old box no one ever opens.” Or Ekalu’s would. There was no reason anyone would make any memorials to me, after my death. “And that thousand years will come, and another and another, to the end of the universe. Think of all the griefs and tragedies, and yes, the triumphs, buried in the past, millions of years of it. Everything for the people who lived them. Nothing now.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

“There is always more after the ending. Always the next morning, and the next. Always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, larges as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Everything ending is from another angle, not really an ending.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

“weren’t many forms of large-scale protest realistically available to most citizens, but one of them was standing in line when you didn’t actually need to.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

“I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were, in fact, God's will.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy