Ann Leckie Quotes

#1. You and your ship will immediately familiarize yourselves with the guidelines for dealing with citizen civilians. And you will follow them. - Author: Ann Leckie

#2. She was born surrounded by wealth and privilege. She thinks she's learned to question that. But she hasn't learned quite as much as she thinks she has, and having that pointed out to her, well, she doesn't react well to it. - Author: Ann Leckie

#3. No real endings, no final perfect happiness, no irredeemable despair. Meetings, yes, breakfasts and suppers. - Author: Ann Leckie

#4. I'm one of those people who always wanted to be a writer, so I have a fair amount of juvenilia, though fortunately, I was too old for my juvenilia to be on the Internet. - Author: Ann Leckie

#5. And it's so easy to just go along. So easy not to see what's happening. And the longer you don't see it, the harder it becomes to see it, because then you have to admit that you ignored it all that time. - Author: Ann Leckie

#6. People are who they are, because oft the world they are living in.
The world is as it is, because of the people living in it. - Author: Ann Leckie

#7. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn't entirely certain. It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak - my own first language - doesn't mark gender in any way. - Author: Ann Leckie

#8. I'm not going to pretend that I never fantasized about winning the Hugo. Or the Nebula, for that matter. I just never thought it was an actual real possibility. - Author: Ann Leckie

#9. I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that. - Author: Ann Leckie

#10. Children are all sorts of people, - Author: Ann Leckie

#11. When I need to get away from my desk, I tend to take walks or go places. I also like to bead - working with beads to make jewellery. - Author: Ann Leckie

#12. Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction? - Author: Ann Leckie

#13. Oh and next time you feel like getting hammered, message me. That was some damn good stuff you puked all over yourself, I think it'd only fair I should get some, too. That hasn't already been through you, I mean. - Author: Ann Leckie

#14. Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is. - Author: Ann Leckie

#15. It's so easy, isn't it, to decide the people you're fighting aren't really human. Or maybe you have to do it, to be able to kill them. - Author: Ann Leckie

#16. But the angrier you get the more painstakingly correct your speech becomes, - Author: Ann Leckie

#17. We are all of us only human. We can only forgive so much. - Author: Ann Leckie

#18. 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them. - Author: Ann Leckie

#19. Fuck, you are an ancillary! - Author: Ann Leckie

#20. You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of. - Author: Ann Leckie

#21. In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we're used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they're supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes. - Author: Ann Leckie

#22. I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings. - Author: Ann Leckie

#23. Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin. - Author: Ann Leckie

#24. I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were, in fact, God's will. - Author: Ann Leckie

#25. It's a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was 'real' religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that's why it's completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices. - Author: Ann Leckie

#26. Do you love randomly?" She blinked in bewilderment. "What?" "Do you love at random? Like pulling counters out of a box? You love whichever one came to hand? Or is there something about certain people that makes them likely to be loved by you? - Author: Ann Leckie

#27. So much is metaphor, an inadequately material way to speak of immaterial things. - Author: Ann Leckie

#28. Ships have feelings. - Author: Ann Leckie

#29. In that case," I said, "go fuck yourself." Which she could actually, literally do, in fact. - Author: Ann Leckie

#30. The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence. - Author: Ann Leckie

#31. The kind of place," I said, still safely in linguistic territory that needed no gender marking, "that will rent me a sledge and sell me a hypothermia kit. How much? - Author: Ann Leckie

#32. When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?' - Author: Ann Leckie

#33. In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful. - Author: Ann Leckie

#34. I would like to point out that as soon as Lieutenant Ekalu let you know that actually, your intended compliment was offensive to her, you immediately stopped trying to be nice. - Author: Ann Leckie

#35. Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial. - Author: Ann Leckie

#36. Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings. - Author: Ann Leckie

#37. Water will wear away stone, but it won't cook supper. Everything has its own strengths. Said with enough irony, it could also imply that since the gods surely had a purpose for everyone the person in question must be good for something, but the speaker couldn't fathom what it might be. - Author: Ann Leckie

#38. When I was a kid, I had no perception whatever that science fiction was supposed to be a boys' club. - Author: Ann Leckie

#39. I don't really have guilty pleasures. I like what I like, and I don't worry too much about whether it's supposed to be cool or sophisticated or show that I have good or bad taste or whatever. - Author: Ann Leckie

#40. One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything - tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn't matter. It's all productive work. - Author: Ann Leckie

#41. To be Radchaai is to be civilised. - Author: Ann Leckie

#42. It's personal. It was just that with me personal affected a great many others. - Author: Ann Leckie

#43. Children are all sorts of people, aren't they, and I suppose if I knew more I'd find some I like and some I don't, just like everyone else. - Author: Ann Leckie

#44. The Internet really lets people connect that wouldn't have in the past, and lets conversations happen and connections happen. - Author: Ann Leckie

#45. Ifs and would-haves changed nothing. - Author: Ann Leckie

#46. Now, I personally enjoy a really good footnote. - Author: Ann Leckie

#47. The point is, there is no point. Choose your own! - Author: Ann Leckie

#48. We have a saying, where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness. - Author: Ann Leckie

#49. Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life. - Author: Ann Leckie

#50. Singing together is something human beings just do, and there are hundreds of years worth of just European vocal music available to read and hear. - Author: Ann Leckie

#51. Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame. - Author: Ann Leckie

#52. Have a beer instead. - Author: Ann Leckie

#53. Governor Giarod was fairly good at not panicking visibly, but, I had discovered, not good at actually not panicking. - Author: Ann Leckie

#54. I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality. - Author: Ann Leckie

#55. Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else. - Author: Ann Leckie

#56. 'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me. - Author: Ann Leckie

#57. I can't see potato chips being popular where there's not land to grow potatoes in or where frying in lots of oil isn't easy or convenient. - Author: Ann Leckie

#58. I've been thinking about it, since you said it," said Seivarden. No, said Mercy of Kalr. "And I've concluded that I don't want to be a captain. But I find I like the thought that I could be. - Author: Ann Leckie

#59. You write alone, but you write hoping that there will be readers who will connect with what you write, and it's so wonderful and amazing - I can't even tell you - when that actually happens. - Author: Ann Leckie

#60. Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones. - Author: Ann Leckie

#61. Sit up straight, Dlique. Don't dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn't nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique. - Author: Ann Leckie

#62. People don't riot for no reason. - Author: Ann Leckie

#63. Civilian casualties?" I asked.
"There always are. - Author: Ann Leckie

#64. Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist and will influence your actions. Your choices. - Author: Ann Leckie

#65. Kids are fabulous, but when you're home all day with an infant that can't talk, your brain starts to kind of melt, and I thought, 'I have to do something, or my brain is just going to liquefy.' - Author: Ann Leckie

#66. Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna. - Author: Ann Leckie

#67. It's easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it's real, when the moment comes to choose. - Author: Ann Leckie

#68. Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem. - Author: Ann Leckie

#69. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic. - Author: Ann Leckie

#70. Working for several years as a waitress, you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table. - Author: Ann Leckie

#71. I've been wanting to compliment you on that', I said to her, in Delsig. 'It was nicely done. Do you compose it that moment, or had you thought about it before? - Author: Ann Leckie

#72. I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school. - Author: Ann Leckie

#73. Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure. - Author: Ann Leckie

#74. The ability to live for five hundred years would be an incredible gift. But I greatly fear it would be a gift only for the wealthy - one that might greatly widen the gap between those with access and those without. - Author: Ann Leckie

#75. Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked. - Author: Ann Leckie

#76. If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one. - Author: Ann Leckie

#77. 'Fountain of youth' is actually kind of ambiguous - does it mean a way to make everyone healthy and let them live indefinitely? Or are we talking about something that would reset you physically to the way you were in your youth, which for various reasons not all of us would be enthused about? - Author: Ann Leckie

#78. Sometimes it feels it's us and Ship against everyone else. - Author: Ann Leckie

#79. I say what I think," said the woman. "My people don't hide behind masks."
"You certainly do," said Awt, equably. "Your mask is rudeness and offensively plain speech. We only see how you wish to appear, not your true self. Mask or not, Watchman Inarakhat has been more honest than you. - Author: Ann Leckie

#80. I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along. - Author: Ann Leckie

#81. Junk food's not going anywhere. The specifics of what's being snacked on, and what's considered 'junk' and what's 'healthy' will change, of course, depending on what's available. - Author: Ann Leckie

#82. If that's what you're willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love? - Author: Ann Leckie

#83. Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs. - Author: Ann Leckie

#84. When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen? - Author: Ann Leckie

#85. Good necessitates evil. - Author: Ann Leckie

#86. Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine. - Author: Ann Leckie

#87. I'd run straight into a bulkhead trying to walk and receive data at the same time ... - Author: Ann Leckie

#88. What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens? - Author: Ann Leckie

#89. You don't need to know the odds. You need to know how to do the thing you're trying to do. And then you need to do it. - Author: Ann Leckie

#90. People don't riot for no reason. And if you're finding you have to deal with the Ychana carefully now, it's because of how they've been treated in the past. - Author: Ann Leckie

#91. If anyone who speaks up to criticise something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilisation will be in a bad way. - Author: Ann Leckie

#92. This struck me as something of a double bind. Speak and your possession of an opinion was plain, clear to anyone. Refrain from speaking and still this was proof of an opinion. If Captain Rubran were to say, Truly, I have no opinion on the matter, would that merely be another proof she had one? - Author: Ann Leckie

#93. You call that rest, do you?" asked Medic. "Up until the bomb went off, yes. - Author: Ann Leckie

#94. If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea. - Author: Ann Leckie

#95. When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans. - Author: Ann Leckie

#96. The natural environment of humans - space stations, ships, constructed habitats. - Author: Ann Leckie

#97. I don't think anybody submits their first story and sells right away. - Author: Ann Leckie

#98. I greatly fear', Citizen Fosyf said before I could answer, 'that the fleet captain's interests are musical rather than spiritual. She's only interested if there's singing - Author: Ann Leckie

#99. The tyrant had said our backgrounds were similar, and in some ways they were. - Author: Ann Leckie

#100. Didn't Notai ships usually have long names? Like Ineluctable Ascendancy of Mind Unfolding or The Finite Contains the Infinite Contains the Finite? Both of those ship names were fictional, characters in more or less famous melodramatic entertainments. - Author: Ann Leckie