Qalea Drop Quotes

“People who think they're already perfect abandon all hope of self-improvement. That's the trap.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“Given some recent events, he'd come to doubt whether being a great warrior was all some made it out to be. But now he'd seen great warriors save the entire corbi race. And Liala had led them, not with bravado and shouting, but with calculation, patience and reason. Being a warrior, then, was more than just one thing. The best warriors, like Liala, Styx, Captain Debogande and Major Thakur, were far more than just brave and dangerous.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“I have identified patterns in the technology and civilisational behaviour that confirms to me, with great certainty, that approximately thirty thousand human years ago, about ten thousand years after the date of the ceephays’ fall, a new center of data and physical traffic accumulated at the Keijir System. Ten thousand years correlates closely with how long I estimate a ceephay vessel would have taken to travel some feasible sublight to avoid detection using jump engines, until being discovered by reeh vessels, possibly in some kind of hibernation. The accumulation of technologies at the Keijir System was very rapid, and was responded to by several of the species who were recording this data. There are even several surviving speculations from their academia at the time, wondering what was happening at Keijir. I believe these events are entirely consistent with the discovery, by an organic species of lesser intelligence and capability, of an entity of greater intelligence and capability. Great technological advances appear to have followed, and the expansion of what became the Reeh Empire commenced shortly thereafter.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“a pleasing geometric pattern maximising firegrid interceptions,”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“She'd come to find civil administration more interesting than war. It's certainly more complicated.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“Croma staff officers, it seemed, liked to make things unnecessarily complicated just as human ones did.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“A people well informed cannot be enslaved.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“You stop asking questions, and you just... accept some smaller version of things. Of the truth.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“There is a law of exponential increase in efficiency that applies to all lifeforms that cluster, synthetic or organic. It is the reason your ancestors found it more productive to move to cities than live in small groups. Humanity found a mathematical law to benefit from, and they've been exploiting that law ever since,”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“Civilians and pop-culture psychologists talk as though achieving bravery is the end of the journey. It’s not, it’s the beginning. And after learning bravery, you must learn to deal with pain. Because after true bravery, there’s always pain.” Lisbeth’s smile turned sad. “Unless you die.” Trace nodded. “Yes. Unless you die. Bravery is dangerous. Cowards live longer.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop