Best 24 quotes of Yoon Ha Lee on MyQuotes

Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father's house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won't find in any astronomer's catalogue.

According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design.

All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture.

But then, war is about taking the future away from people.

Crying was something it had only seen humans do in dramas, and in dramas they did it much more prettily, at dramatic moments, with swelling music in the background. Instead, the girl was getting mucus on her sleeve, and Hemiola didn’t understand the context, and it doubted she would appreciate it providing swelling music on her behalf.

Even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway.

He knelt to pet the friendlier of Zehun’s two cats, Fenez. The other one was hiding, as usual. Fenez still bore a scary resemblance to a knitting project gone horribly awry.

History forgives the winner a lot of things.

I don't suppose", Cheris said to the servitor, "you know what resources I'm allowed to include in my proposal?" ... "Any plan you can induce Kel command to accept is permitted," it said: not quite a tautology.

Immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people.

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.

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.

In the Compact, there’s a nascent democratic state backed by High General Kel Brezan. The Kel are having fits trying to figure out the mess.” “‘Democratic’?” Jedao said. “What’s that?” “They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said. Jedao mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical

It still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree.

Mikodez had always known that cats were more treacherous than his own people.

Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?

Sometimes the best way to understand people was through their food.

The first rule of any game was to assume you could win, even if you had to hunt through the universe’s cracks for a strategy, even if you had to turn the pieces inside-out, even if you had to tell so many lies to the opponent that they couldn’t figure out which way was up.

The man doesn't look like he belongs in a world of parking tickets and potted begonias and pencil sharpeners. But he can learn, the way you have.

The presence of atrocity doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. You’ll arguably be better at dealing with the horrible things you have to witness, or even to perpetrate, if you allow yourself time to do the small, simple things that make you happy. Instead of looking for ways to destroy yourself.

This time they're making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation.

What did I do this time?” “Nothing,” Istradez said. “No one ever says ‘nothing’ and means it.

What good is immortality if nothing has been done to repair the fault lines in the human heart?

What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?