Ada Palmer Quotes & Sayings

On a scale of one to pissed I'd rate them pissed. — Ada Palmer

Child: "The Major and the soldiers and Mycroft told me what war is like. They say it's the second worst thing in the world."
Man: "That's an interesting definition. What did they say is the worst thing?"
Child: "Not having anything worth fighting for in the first place. — Ada Palmer

It doesn't take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an 'us' and a 'them.' And a spark. — Ada Palmer

It isn't only the Utopians who become a little more immortal with every blade they take away. It isn't only they who delight in seeing unicorns and wingrays in the street, who gaze through Griffincloth into enchanting nowheres, and ride the shuttles to the brave, bare Moon, which their efforts make a little less bare every day. We all enjoy these wonders, all of us, all Hives, all Hiveless. Reader, you should not have barred Apollo Mojave from the Pantheon. — Ada Palmer

Have you never watched a death, reader? In slow cases like blood loss it is not so much a moment as a stretch of ambiguity - one breath leaves and you wait uncertain for the next: was that the last? One more? Two more? A — Ada Palmer

Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn. — Ada Palmer

Nothing under Providence is ever certain until an agent goes and tries and makes it so. — Ada Palmer

I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world. — Ada Palmer

A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars. — Ada Palmer

Bryar Kosala just likes helping people, and is good at running things, and when invited to become the world's Mom she said, "Sure. — Ada Palmer

Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won't tell you whether the enemy's perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near. — Ada Palmer

understood then, but these past years, seeing Bridger's powers, I let myself fall into the delusion that Providence might be simple. — Ada Palmer

We all imagine happy endings to such books, pick out the page, the paragraph, in which we would step in and pluck the innocents to safety. — Ada Palmer

More than sixty years ago we instituted floating citizenship, so children of mixed parents would not be compelled to choose between several equal fatherlands. It was not the end of our countries. Almost everyone still prefers to have a homeland to love and return to, and the legal possibility of life without a homeland does not destroy the bonds of culture, language, and history which make a homeland home. — Ada Palmer

My universe does not have time," the foreign God replied. "I find it cruel, like death and distance and misunderstanding, barriers separating that which would rather be whole. I — Ada Palmer

Have you come to help Me?"

The sensayer waited, uncertain whether the words were meant for her. "Help you how?" she asked.

The stone-still Speaker did not turn. "To understand the God Who made this portrait of Himself."

Carlyle looked to the altarpiece, the choirs of Heaven shimmering in their concentric circles of cracking paint and gold. "People made that, human beings searching for their own understanding."

"If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. — Ada Palmer

Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you? — Ada Palmer

Books, even made-up stories, can't all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn't always happy. — Ada Palmer

Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once? — Ada Palmer

Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God. — Ada Palmer

when our Twenty-Second-Century forefathers created the Servicer Program, offering lifelong community service in lieu of prison for criminals judged harmless enough to walk among the free, were they progressive or retrogressive in implementing a seven-hundred-year-old system which had never actually existed? — Ada Palmer