Top 100 Ann Leckie Quotes
#2. For my part," I replied, "I find forgiveness overrated. There are times and places when it's appropriate. But not when the demand that you forgive is used to keep you in your place.
Ann Leckie
#3. Sometimes it feels it's us and Ship against everyone else.
Ann Leckie
#4. 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.
Ann Leckie
#5. Betrayer! Long ago we promised
To exchange equally, gift for gift.
Take this curse: What you destroy will destroy you.
Ann Leckie
#6. 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.
Ann Leckie
#7. 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.
Ann Leckie
#8. If that's what you're willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love?
Ann Leckie
#9. It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.
Ann Leckie
#10. 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.
Ann Leckie
#11. 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?
Ann Leckie
#12. I didn't ever imagine, except in the most idle, obviously wish-fulfillment, ego-gratification fantasies, that anything I wrote would ever win awards, let alone so many.
Ann Leckie
#13. The 'indistinguishable from magic' thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.
Ann Leckie
#14. '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?
Ann Leckie
#15. Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
Ann Leckie
#16. Strange, how equally important, just different always seemed to translate into some "equally important" roles being more worthy of respect and reward than others.
Ann Leckie
#17. I'd run straight into a bulkhead trying to walk and receive data at the same time ...
Ann Leckie
#18. I'd say my biggest influences are writers like Andre Norton and, particularly when it comes to the Radch, C.J. Cherryh.
Ann Leckie
#19. What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?
Ann Leckie
#20. If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.
Ann Leckie
#21. I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
Ann Leckie
#22. Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.
Ann Leckie
#23. Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.
Ann Leckie
#24. I didn't get where I am by having reasonable goals
Ann Leckie
#25. 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.
Ann Leckie
#26. Odd people, as I said, and I owe them a great deal, though they would be offended and distressed to think anyone owed them anything.
Ann Leckie
#27. My taste in both is pretty eclectic. I do encourage people to try new and different kinds of tea if they can - there are so many different sorts, and so many, flavored or not, and there's bound to be something you like. The same with choral music, really.
Ann Leckie
#28. 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.
Ann Leckie
#29. You and your ship will immediately familiarize yourselves with the guidelines for dealing with citizen civilians. And you will follow them.
Ann Leckie
#30. 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.
Ann Leckie
#31. But the angrier you get the more painstakingly correct your speech becomes,
Ann Leckie
#32. We are all of us only human. We can only forgive so much.
Ann Leckie
#33. '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.
Ann Leckie
#35. You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.
Ann Leckie
#36. 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.
Ann Leckie
#37. But I had never noticed that anyone profited from needless spite,
Ann Leckie
#38. I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.
Ann Leckie
#39. If anyone who speaks up to criticise something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilisation will be in a bad way.
Ann Leckie
#40. 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.
Ann Leckie
#41. Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin.
Ann Leckie
#42. I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were, in fact, God's will.
Ann Leckie
#43. After about fourth grade, I do remember borrowing my mother's old portable Olivetti and typing stories out on the back of photocopies of journal articles.
Ann Leckie
#44. Your very great pardon, Cousin," said Sphene, "but this having meetings so we can plan to have meetings business is bullshit. I want to talk about ancillaries.
Ann Leckie
#45. 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.
Ann Leckie
#46. I've been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.
Ann Leckie
#47. From a child I was taught to forgive and forget, but it's difficult to forget these things, the loss of parents, of children and grandchildren.
Ann Leckie
#48. Now that's something different! I'm not bored of buckets yet!
Ann Leckie
#49. 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.
Ann Leckie
#51. Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna.
Ann Leckie
#52. 'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.
Ann Leckie
#53. 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.
Ann Leckie
#54. Security is here to protect citizens. You can't do that if you insist on seeing any of them as adversaries.
Ann Leckie
#55. You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side.
Ann Leckie
#56. 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.
Ann Leckie
#57. 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.
Ann Leckie
#58. 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.
Ann Leckie
#59. Sit up straight, Dlique. Don't dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn't nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique.
Ann Leckie
#61. Civilian casualties?" I asked.
"There always are.
Ann Leckie
#62. 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.
Ann Leckie
#63. 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.'
Ann Leckie
#64. It's always for show, Citizen. It is entirely possible to grieve with no outward sign. These things are meant to let others know about it.
Ann Leckie
#65. 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.
Ann Leckie
#66. Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.
Ann Leckie
#67. 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.
Ann Leckie
#68. 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.
Ann Leckie
#69. It had been, for both of our lives. Frantic action, then months or even years waiting for something to happen.
Ann Leckie
#70. 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?
Ann Leckie
#71. I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.
Ann Leckie
#72. Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.
Ann Leckie
#73. 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.
Ann Leckie
#74. Get some rest. Kalr will bring supper to your quarters. Things will seem better after you've eaten and slept." "Really?" she asked. Bitter and challenging. "Well, not necessarily," I admitted. "But it's easier to deal with things when you've had some rest and some breakfast.
Ann Leckie
#75. Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.
Ann Leckie
#76. The tyrant had said our backgrounds were similar, and in some ways they were.
Ann Leckie
#77. 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?
Ann Leckie
#78. You call that rest, do you?" asked Medic. "Up until the bomb went off, yes.
Ann Leckie
#79. If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.
Ann Leckie
#80. Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.
Ann Leckie
#81. When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.
Ann Leckie
#82. The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
Ann Leckie
#83. The natural environment of humans - space stations, ships, constructed habitats.
Ann Leckie
#84. I don't think anybody submits their first story and sells right away.
Ann Leckie
#85. I knew and cared nothing about the will of the gods. I only knew that I would land where I myself had been cast, wherever that would be.
Ann Leckie
#86. The lessons of slushing and editing build up over time, and you're not necessarily thinking about them while you're working, but they're in the back of your mind, probably influencing your choices.
Ann Leckie
#87. In the end it's only ever been one step, and then the next.
Ann Leckie
#88. 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
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.
Ann Leckie
#90. I do realize the impulse to classify people by the food and art they consume is strong - sometimes I have to remind myself not to do that.
Ann Leckie
#91. 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.
Ann Leckie
#92. Just how good of a citizen does one have to be" I asked, "in order to have water, air, and medical help?
Ann Leckie
#93. Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist and will influence your actions. Your choices.
Ann Leckie
#94. One of the nice things about a second book is that your readers already have so much of the introductions on board, they don't have to put all their attention into figuring out the world and can more easily let that play out as a background to the other things you want to do.
Ann Leckie
#96. You do have a thousand years' seniority, after all."
"A thousand years' back pay," said a dock inspector, in an awed voice.
Ann Leckie
#97. Governor Giarod was fairly good at not panicking visibly, but, I had discovered, not good at actually not panicking.
Ann Leckie
#98. 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.
Ann Leckie
#99. Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else.
Ann Leckie
#100. I will share one of them with you now: most people don't want trouble, but frightened people are liable to do very dangerous things.
Ann Leckie
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