C.J. Cherryh Quotes

Bren turned back to the room, somewhat easier about the boy, and realizing only then that he and the dowager had both just leaped into order-giving regarding the aiji's own son, in the aiji's and the consort's presence and in front of witnesses.
Habit. Two years of habit. He was mortified.

Flying was no cure for want of sleep. The brain wanted time to recycle: when it became all one long, uninterrupted day, the ability to keep going and to keep thinking was no warrant it was healty even for Superman.-Superman

If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.

Oh, man,' Azdra'ik said. 'This is what our eldest saw. This is what our legends say. Who could know, but us?

Jase-aiji suggests this maneuver will be extremely long, even days, and that for comfort and dignity - "
"No," Ilisidi said abruptly. "We will not go below."
"Nand' dowager . . ."
"Interesting things happen here. Not there. If I were reckless of staff safety I would send after hot tea," Ilisidi said. "I forego the tea. In that, I have taken my personal precautions and my staff is settled in safety.

Gods and Thunders!

I most fear stupid people. Stupid people will do anything. Truly smart people will do only what is logical for them to do.

What we individually deserve isn't as much as what we collectively merit.

Trade isn't about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.

But there was someone she knew who could speak with a special knowledge on the Cross-Lexcorp controversy. Someone she'd rather not deal with. Someone she'd as soon not see again as long as she lived. Her former fiancé. Lex. Lex Luthor. – Lois Lane

Take care of him, her father had charged her. She had thought - until he wakes. But she began to see what her father had trusted to her, and how very much Sasha needed someone he could trust-
Someone as brave as her father, someone not afraid of him - no matter what.

A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding ... and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.

And she learned to do that, be very nice to people she knew quite well were the Enemy, and even like them sometimes: it didn't mean you weren't going to Get them, because they were bound to do something that would remind you what they were sooner or later.

It was a monumental achievement that the serpentine tc'a had once upon a time gotten the knnn to understand the concept of trade: so nowadays knnn simply contacted a station, rushed onto its methane-dock and deposited whatever they liked, grabbed whatever they wanted and left. This was an improvement over their former behavior, in which they simply looted and left.

But, oh, how precious those things were! To look at the sky, breathe the cold wind, have fingers nipped by chill and skin stung red and heart stirred to life, gods, he had been dead until Tristen arrived and asked him the first vexing question, and posed him the first insoluble puzzle, and marveled at hailstones and mourned over falling leaves. What miracles there were all around ...

The t'ca [ship] left them, rolled and slewed off in a maneuver that made sense to a multi-brained snake.

A fine lady she weren't, oh, but a damn fine woman and a brave one ...

The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.

It lent a Man a certain peace of mind ... to ride through threats and terrors unhearing: it even lent a man a certain real protection, for he could not hear temptation and bad advice to be swayed by it, but it was no protection at all when power reached out with tangible results and brought down the lightning.

Brains and sex fight each other to control your life, and thank God brains get a head start before sex comes along.

Is that the end ... of all the races and civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?

He knew that he wielded magic as well as iron, and yet looked away from it, and made himself fables to explain his own presence in the world, and sought gods who might be more powerful than himself. It would be very comfortable if there were someone more powerful than himself, on this Road, on this particular morning, someone to guide him, even someone to blame ...

The warrior may fight for gold or for an immediate gain, or for something to take home for the winter to feed the family. The soldier is part of a more complex society. He's fighting for a group ethic of some sort.

Don't mourn might-have-beens . Magic can't work backwards , only forward . I taught you better than that .

A warrior is free to be a hero and pull off daring do and the soldier is irresponsible if he does it.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage
as long as you edit brilliantly.

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

Nothing's hopeless except never trying.

Were the seeds of next things always there, in the circle of the year, and was that how the world worked its miracles?

Deal with the Devil if the Devil has a constituency - and don't complain about the heat.

I couldn't yet see the limits of my life, but he could see the limits of his. His life was thin, and he had a hunger for recognition.

Women did such things and went on doing them while the sun died because in all of women's lives there were so many moments that would kill the mind if one thought about them, which would suck the heart and the life out of one, and engrave lines in the face and put gray in the hair if ever one let one's mind work; but there was in the rhythm and the fascination of the stitches a loss of thought, a void, a blank, that was only numbers and not even that, because the mind did not need to count, the fingers did, the length of a thread against the finger measured evenly as a ruler could divide it, the slight difference in tension sensed finely as a machine could sense, the exact number of stitches keeping pattern without really the need to count, but something inward and regular as the beat of a heart, as the slow passing of time which could be frozen in such acts, or speeded past.

Writing day and night for months ... that's hard.

We are the Face that Looks Outward. We are makers of paths, walkers on the wind

I do not think any SFWA communication should come anywhere NEAR the internet.

Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better.

Baji-naji, nand' paidhi. Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets.

One tribe moves out and one tribe stays. History broadens, and philosophy shifts, develops a rift, splits one population from the other . . . and a schism happens, minor or major. It's the way humankind has always proliferated. We go over the next hill, live a few hundred years, change our languages to accommodate things we never saw before - and before we know it, our cousins think we have an accent. Or we think they have a strange attitude. And we don't really understand our cousins any longer.

Yes, aiji-ma." "What is this agreement? You are most valuable when you argue, paidhi! Do not say yes to me!" "I shall most strenuously object when you are wrong, aiji-ma. You have been infallibly right at least this last hour." "Ha.

Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!

Trust was a word you couldn't translate. But the atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.

When it is necessary to survive, then one cannot be brave anymore.

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words - if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night - do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?

Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much fiath?
Could ever there be too much love?
And could love require lies?

Before is the only time you own, the only before you can trust is now, and you don't even know how long before is.

For another - you can move faster than she can. You are as recognizable as she is. And you are willing to take cover. We are not so certain about the dowager.

But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.

Belief ... was its own magic-so long as it was carefully placed, often examined, like a bridge kept in careful repair.

Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.

He had read about evil in Efanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad ... but none without self-interest, none he could not understand even in terms of his own will to have his way.

Once he had thought it a refuge, once he had thought it holiness ... But now he began to suspect that the good brothers did not shadow the ether not because they were good, but because they had masked themselves from everything, had carefully erased their stray thoughts, had poured out their human longings, emptied themselves of desires and become so transparent as existence that they had not only ceased to be evil, they had ceased to be good. They had ceased to fight the battles of everyday life, and simply weighed nothing. Not a feather. Not a grain. They had given up everything, until they vanished from the scale of all that mattered, having given away themselves long before any power declared the contest.

Honor to the earth," the abbot said, "honor to the dead in the passing of the year; honor to the living, in the coming of the new. A Great Year passes tonight. A new one begins. Let the good that is old continue and let the rest perish ...

I'm not a person who stands still well. But the the earth is always in motion, and I like keeping up with it. I don't want just to exist. I want to know. I want to see. I want to understand.

Yes, ma'am," he said, and folded his hands and stopped where he was, listening, waiting while a very sick woman tried to gather her faculties.
"First off, tell the dowager she's a right damn bastard."
It was no time for a translator to argue. Mitigation, however, was a reasonable tactic. "Aiji-ma, Sabin-aiji has heard our suspicions regarding Tamun and received assurances from me and Gin-aiji that we have not arranged a coup of our own. She addresses you with an untranslatable term sometimes meaning extreme disrepute, sometimes indicating respect for an opponent."
Ilisidi's mouth drew down in wicked satisfaction. "Return the compliment, paidhi."
"Captain, she says you're a right damn bastard, too.

He was home, but he wasn't. He had gotten where he had to go, but he hadn't. He had found out who he was, but he didn't know why it had failed to satify his questions.

There was a certain wisdom in doing little, when one was obliged to act in ignorance.

The necessity of getting up. He made it that far. Ended up with Banichi's arm around him, Banichi standing on one leg. The dowager-aiji said something rude about young men falling at her feet, and go sit down, SHE was in command of the plane.

It struck at the root of intentions, not at the flower.
And both root and the flower were important to him, one having to do with what one meant to do ... and the other, most fearsome, with the outcome of it.

Lois. Oh… no. Lois. Dinner. His name … be it Clark Kent or Superman …was mud. –Clark Kent

Clark. Superman. She loved two men. It was extraordinary how alike and how different they were.-Lois Lane

Change happened and you thought it was forever, and immediately there were all the enemies of that change making common cause and meeting in the cloakrooms.

He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

He could be distracted, still, by beauty, by the wonder of a stroke of sunlight. Perhaps at such times he made himself open to wizardry-or conversely, was as warded and safe at such moments as Ynefel at its strongest. Perhaps threats simply slid past his attention and he made himself immune.

The world was so beautiful, and there was so much of it: he could gaze forever at the wonder of leaves and not see them all: could inhale the wind and not smell all its scents, hear the sounds of men and horses and not hear all the sounds of the woods, and taste the thousand flavors in stale water and still find it wonderful ... because it was not the darkness.

Coincidence is how God makes physics work.

You know its shape, since you have it. Give it up, and be paid. Or don't - and be paid, hani, be paid then too.