The Raven Tower Quotes

“I’ve been thinking,” I said to Oissen, when he returned the next afternoon. “Yes, the Myriad had warned me you might do that.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“The question is not, said the Myriad, whether distant events will affect us. This is not truly a question-- they can and they will. Nor is the question how we will be affected. One can make any number of careful and informed guesses, but until events occur any predictions are subject to error, to the extent that one's information, or one's understanding, may be incomplete. [...] The relevant question here, it seems to me, is not any of those things. It is, rather, Do you care?”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Perhaps the length of one’s life was not important—except in the way it is to so many living beings, desperate to avoid death. Perhaps, long or short, it mattered how one spent that time.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“And you turned fully to stare at your hand against the wall, and then down at your feet, feeling that constant, faint, grinding vibration traveling through the yellowish stones. Could you hear me, Eolo? Can you hear me now? I’m talking to you.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I thought also of those gods I’d seen in the time before humans had existed, who could not have possibly spoken a human language and yet had wielded great power. Could it be that language was not the source of the power, but one possible tool for using that power?”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“At any rate, that being the case, why should I care if I lay under layers of rock the whole time? Why, as long as I’d been in this world already, should I care if my end came in another millennia, or a hundred of them? What sort of urgent business did I have in the world that I did not want to leave it? When I had spent my long time listening to fish, or staring at the stars? What was the point, what had ever been the point, in my constant, unconscious effort to keep that view of the stars? None except that I had wanted it.

It had made things pleasant for me.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Then and there he vowed himself a changed man, the special devotee of the Myriad, and publicly resolved to deal more patiently and gently with others for the rest of his life. Five years later he died in an argument over the ownership of a reindeer calf.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I am the Strength and Patience of the Hill! And I am the god of Vastai, who until now has sustained Iraden! And you, little snake, will not be the first god I have killed. No, nor even the second.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“(In Vastai this is usually part of a petition for the God of the Silent to send one a good husband and a happy marriage. These three, however, were asking for the forest to preserve their friendship so long as they lived, and keep undesirable complications like husbands far from their doors.)”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I don’t answer that sort of question, I told her, by means of the tokens. I thought you understood that. I don’t foretell the future, except in the way that anyone does.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I will always, always thank my local libraries: the St. Louis County Library, the Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County, the St. Louis Public Library, the Webster University Library, and the University of Missouri–St. Louis Thomas Jefferson Library. And all you interlibrary loan librarians out there—thanks for what you do! Libraries are a public good. Please support yours in whatever way you can.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I was still profoundly alone. And I remained alone, watching the stars—did you know, aside from their regular nightly and yearly cycles there is another, longer movement? So, so much slower, and I was watching this, and admiring it, alone, until someone arrived to break my solitude.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“And humans, who by my reasoning had less ground than I to think anything they did might matter in any real way, did far more. They traveled. They changed the landscape in large and small ways. They put plans in motion that they knew they would not see completed - plans that would benefit not them but their children and their grandchildren. When I - I had kept myself clear of dirt and leaves and snow.

Perhaps the length of one's life was not important - except in the way it is to so many living beings, desperate to avoid death. Perhaps, long or short, it mattered how one spent that time.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“You wanted to flee the room, back out onto the stairs, but you made yourself circle me two more times. Frowning, trying to understand. As you walked around me I said, “Now, Eolo, can you hear me?”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“while days grew shorter in the winter, there were no times when the sun did not rise at all, nor days in the summer when it did not set.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I have very little else to do, and I have always watched and listened and pondered, and besides, the Raven Tower of Vastai is made of stone.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“I found myself atop one of these. And I began to wonder why that was. I ought to have been pressed flat as everything else had been, trapped under the glacier or buried under the debris that had accumulated on its surface over so very long. But I had not. I had stayed above the ice, and now I sat on this new, rounded hill surrounded by rolling, treeless, grass-covered plain.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“This priest knew to be patient. She knew from experience, hers and her predecessors’, that it could take a very long time to teach language to a god.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Stories can be risky for someone like me. What I say must be true, or it will be made true, and if it cannot be made true—if I don’t have the power, or if what I have said is an impossibility”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Can you hear me now?
I'm talking to you.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“What is it that makes language a far more powerful---and risky-----tool for gods than it is is for even humans? What is it that makes gods gods? What am I”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Già da tempo mi sono fatto un'idea vaga e generale di come sono assemblati i corpi umani, di come funzionano - quando funzionano - e di quali sono le cose che ne fanno cessare immancabilmente il funzionamento. Ma negli ultimi anni ho esaminato tutto più nel dettaglio. Ho visto il contrarsi e il rilassarsi dei muscoli, il tremore della stanchezza, il battere violento del cuore e il respiro affannoso del dolore e dell'angoscia. I singhiozzi muti nella gola di chi si dispera, lo sguardo basso, piatto, vitreo, di chi ha perso ogni speranza di riposo che non sia quello subdolo e fulmineo della morte. Ho sentito grida d'angoscia che supplicavano e poi maledicevano un dio apparentemente sordo e il logorio di polsi legati che si ricoprono di sangue e di vesciche. Ho visto queste cose e ho riflettuto su di esse e su ciò che implicano. Su ciò che significano.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“What is it that makes language a far more powerful—and risky—tool for gods than it is for even humans? What is it that makes gods gods? What am I?”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Given a bit more time he might have realized that what kept him alive was the same god whose continued existence drained his power so relentlessly.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“He is gone away,” acknowledged Dupesu. “He is afraid here, we are wait so long, and he will not stay. He is say he is safer away.” He took his elbows off the table and leaned back. “We are try pray to the Raven and offer gifts direct but the Raven is not answer. And this is a question for Prince Mawat as well. Why does the Raven nothing? Why is the heir must sit naked before the fortress gates to complain of this wrong, to tell the people, to make Lease Hibal to deal with his complain? Why is he not complain to the Raven himself? Where is the god of Iraden?” “Wherever he wishes to be, I suppose,” you said. “Is it not strange,” observed Dupesu, “that he is not here now and I am think he might be needed?” From under his collar, the snake’s tongue flickered out and then back, no other sign of the snake itself but a bulge under the fabric of his tunic. “Excuse me,” you said, rising. “I have business to attend to.” And without waiting for an answer you left.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“Your father could not be found, the lord Radihaw had said the day before to Mawat. Not in the tower, not in the fortress, not in the town. And yet it seemed that he could not have left the fortress without someone knowing.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower

“In Iraden her name is a curse, but among the reindeer hunters—whose name for themselves meant something like Us People—it was a blessing. They called her the Myriad.”
― Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower