Ann Leckie quotes:

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.

Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.

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.

Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.

There are two parts to reacting aren't there? How you feel and what you do. And its the thing you do that is the important one.

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over all that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama - civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in ... But I didn't want my future - however fanciful it was - to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren't meant to be Romans in Space.

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.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.

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.

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.

Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

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?

If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.