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

To be Radchaai is to be civilised..

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..

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

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

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

Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don't you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead….

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Mea….

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

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as….

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

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 univ….

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

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

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

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

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 ….