Ancillary Justice Quotes

“Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“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, Ancillary Justice

“The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference. I’m not only speaking of the small actions that, cumulatively, over time, or in great numbers, alter the course of events in ways too chaotic or subtle to trace ... if everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimetre, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“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?”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“If that’s what you’re willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love?”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“...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, Ancillary Justice

“I didn't get where I am by having reasonable goals”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“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, Ancillary Justice

“We have a saying, where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“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, Ancillary Justice

“People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren't quite so simple.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“In that case,” I said, “go fuck yourself.” Which she could actually, literally do, in fact.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Ships have feelings.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“If you're going to do something that crazy, save it for when it'll make a difference, Lieutenant Skaaiat had said, and I had agreed. I still agree.

The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“You never knelt to get anywhere. You are where you are because you're fucking capable, and willing to risk everything to do right, and I'll never be half what you are even if I tried my whole life, and I was walking around thinking I was better than you, even half dead and no use to anyone, because my family is old, because I was born better.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“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, Ancillary Justice

“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.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Nearly everywhere I've been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity's original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn't, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is part of an intricate whole and to understand why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as “just a coincidence.” Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice