To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they're programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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