Best 16 quotes of Ada Palmer on MyQuotes

Ah, reader, I understand it is your kindness which fills you with this hubris, but it is hubris still. You presume, not only to advise your Maker, but to demand that He respond to your advice by revising the infinite and perfect Plan of His Creation precisely as you--with your flawed and finite wisdom--recommend?

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.

Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn.

Celibacy is the most extreme of sexual perversions, after all.

Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but they admitted the place of sex in every thought and gesture, while our prudish era, hiding behind the neutered ‘they,’ pretends that we do not assume any two people who lock eyes may have fornicated in their minds if not their flesh. You protest: My mind is not as dirty as thine, Mycroft. My distress is at the strangeness of applying ‘he’ and ‘she’ to thy 2450s, where they have no place. Would that you were right, good reader. Would that ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their electric power were unknown in my day. Alas, it is from these very words that the transformation came which I am commanded to describe, so I must use them to describe it. I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.

Epicuro,” Spain interrupted with a firmness that made us all turn, “you don’t want humanity to fail your Great Test because the lot of us, who should be out there shepherding, were stuck here, riveted, listening to you arguing theodicy with Voltaire.

I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.

I don’t like boys.” I shook my head. “That’s no impediment to them. Madame raised gentlemen of both sexes.

Mr. Smith is a banker, Mrs. Christian is a nurse, as if those twenty or forty or sixty hours made the other hundred of each week nothing. How do you introduce yourself at parties, reader? Are you a cook? A hiker? A reader? A moviegoer?

No one comes to stone the servant when they could watch the execution of the king.

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.

Ockham stood so calmly through the outburst, watching hysteria drain the color from Carlyle's face. It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts, through empires, but India, calm, mighty India, fears nothing.

One straying angel won’t make God tremble.

Secrets pour out like water, even from a single hole

The sensayer frowned. “You’re saying you discuss theology while having sex.” “For beginners it’s before and after mostly, managing it during sex takes skill and concentration.

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. You must forgive me my ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and ‘he’s and ‘she’s, my lack of modern words and modern objectivity. It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are.