Conservation of Shadows Quotes

“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.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“There are too many shapes of love to be counted. One of them is forgiveness.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth. What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts. Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“I have loved you in your own language, Kaela thought as she picked up her blades, so softly that we never knew it. Let your language be mine; let me cast my own shadows.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Schrödinger's cat has far more than nine lives, and far fewer. All of us are unknowing cats, alive and dead at once, and of all the might-have-beens in between, we record only one.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“You always have a choice," Jedao said. "It's just that most of them are bad.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“I don’t know how to live.” “But you do,” she said. “It’s all about the distinguishing moments. It’s about going from one to the next, no matter how small the interval of time, or how long.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“This time they're making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“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.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Orchestrate a battle; orchestrate a piece of music. This isn't the only language that uses the same verb for both.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“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.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift, the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.
This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“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?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“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.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“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.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Everything's an expression of some reality.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows