Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Deserts seem to develop primarily due to human stupidity,”
― Intisar Khanani, Memories of Ash

“I’m frightened all the time, yet I can’t wish myself elsewhere.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Mission

“To use the machineries of justice to commit injustice is the deepest offense to the Father of Winter.” He”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Mission

“Two things are essential for getting people to trust in the system: fair courts and equally fair taxation. Just these two.” In”
― Yoshiki Tanaka, Endurance

“When political authority and journalism colluded with one another, democracy lost its ability to critique and cleanse itself, allowing a deadly infection to take root.”
― Yoshiki Tanaka, Endurance

“Society gained more by not placing excessive power in the hands of mediocre politicians than it lost by limiting the power of great heroes and statesmen who might or might not appear once every few centuries.”
― Yoshiki Tanaka, Endurance

“One gets carried away when one feels one’s dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error.” *”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“But like all outsiders in good faith with the establishment, they tended to forget their revolutionary roots and side with the establishment.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Threat is another word for change. Status quo ante is not preferable to all change.”
― Max Gladstone, The Craft Sequence: The First Five Novels

“I wish I could abandon this project,” Ms. Kevarian said. “But several hundred miles of coastline and a hundred million people are in danger of attack by, I swear, giant moths, if I abandon my work.”
― Max Gladstone, The Craft Sequence: The First Five Novels

“Hah. In that wise, we had best put speculation aside, and consider the evidence of our senses.”
― Sharon Lee, Scout's Progress

“Why are you always right, Captain?" "Now, do you know, my perspective is that I'm often wrong.”
― Sharon Lee, Scout's Progress

“Jethri had lately formed the theory that this reluctance to offer information was not what a Terran would call spitefulness, but courtesy. It would be—an insult, if his reading of the tapes was right, to assume that another person was ignorant of any particular something.”
― Sharon Lee, Balance of Trade

“Glancing aside, for Liadens counted a too-long stare at the face as rudeness,”
― Sharon Lee, Balance of Trade

“The instinct for profit, thought Jela—personal profit. That instinct was maybe not a long-term survival trait.”
― Sharon Lee, Crystal Soldier

“It’s as I taught you: the world is bigger and more important than you.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch

“You didn’t fight the way I would have, but that doesn’t matter. You won. I brought relevant items to your attention, but since you were doing your job, it was in everyone’s best interest for me to shut up and stay out of your way. I have watched a lot of junior officers get ruined by their superiors’ refusal to allow them the least bit of autonomy.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“She flung the door open with a flourish, revealing a scene of utter pandemonium.”
― Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown

“I believe that we cannot make any impact at the individual level unless we create systemic change,”
― Karen Lord, The Galaxy Game

“We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Fire

“I had not realized how much anger I held against my heart for all the people who use others as nothing more than tools to build a house for themselves, who wrap chains around others and then claim they have the right and even the obligation to do so.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Steel

“The magic word is oops,”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“here we get four seasons, three of them winter.”
― Faith Erin Hicks, Comics Will Break Your Heart

“Canada’s history was completely mysterious to him. Did they fight any wars for their independence? Were they independent? They had the queen on their money, so maybe not.”
― Faith Erin Hicks, Comics Will Break Your Heart

“Farley Mowat is known for being a particularly patriotic and vengeful ghost,”
― Faith Erin Hicks, Comics Will Break Your Heart

“Everywhere’s Baltimore.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“Jeeves, I must ask your assistance in the matter of the pronoun.”
― Sharon Lee, Ghost Ship