Top 150 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “And then it dropped lower, and her eyes caught it in all its pale majesty. It was a moth, no more, no less, but as it circled down towards them she saw that its furry body was larger than that of a horse, its wingspan awesome, each wing as long as six men laid end to end. It had a small head, eyes glittering amongst the glossy fur behind frond-like antennae that extended forward in delicate furls. As it landed, the sweep of its wings extinguished most of their little fires.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

52. “The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

53. “Most conspiracies, after all, seem weird on the surface but are really an attempt to drag things down to a human scale: a flat Earth instead of the immensity of the cosmos, shadowy illuminati instead of a chaotic mess of chance, incompetence and greed.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

54. “We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

55. “We do not respect our enemies; we despair of them. Your struggle, your fierce will to prevail in spite of all, we do not admire this. We see only a terrible, senseless waste of life – both ours and yours. We see murdered potential, young men and women who might have become anything becoming only corpses through one woman’s dreams of conquering a city she has not even seen.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

56. “It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

57. “Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well –now that Portia and her party have established their superiority –and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

58. “Damn you!” he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the powers of Earth resided, whether gods or just rich people in spaceships.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

59. “Are they wondering if Lain and I will save them by being here? Because, if so, they weren’t listening to Guyen closely enough before.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

60. “Her attention had drifted a little and, by the time she realized what he had said, the words had passed on to the crew. She registered suddenly a murmur of concerned messages between them, and even simple spoken words whispered between those closest to her. Doctor Mercian meanwhile sent her an alert on another channel: ‘Why is Sering in the engine core?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

61. “He tested his fragile composure and found that it would take his weight.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

62. “Hartnell had no idea what Murray would be doing with his life if he wasn’t ordering animals to kill people in the name of a shadowy junta of ousted special interests. Probably something in investment banking or venture capitalism, any trade where an utter inability to empathise with the people he hurt was considered a positive boon.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

63. “We’re here and they trust us.’ Mal chuckled. ‘It’s a million-to-one long shot, and only these two desperate lesbians can save the world. Perfect action movie material.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

64. “Bees’ channel: Killing humans is what we are for. Dragon’s channel: Killing humans is even what humans are for.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

65. “Shadrapar has no purpose, no function. It exists for itself only, its own downward spiral to oblivion. It exists only to imprison the minds of those who dwell within it, so that their world shrinks until it holds nothing but their own desires, and they fight to stop you showing what’s beyond the bars. So I called it the cage of souls, so they would understand.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

66. “The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

67. “Do you remember, all those years ago, when you would talk and talk, and I would say nothing at all? How we have changed.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

68. “Helping people is like beating your head against a wall, and in the end, when you live forever and you’re sick of the same mistakes over and over and over; in the end the only thing left is just to amuse yourself at their expense. Because you can’t make things better, and frankly, no matter how much evil you do, you’re not making things much worse, either.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

69. “Sometimes it is hard because we have to make choices. I remember when having to make choices scared me more than anything else except Master being angry with me. Now I know that making choices is the price of being free.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

70. “He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

71. “This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

72. “We are here because we are dangerous. I do not understand: they made us to be dangerous. I do not see how they can be surprised when we were.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

73. “I am the full stop to the sentence that is human history.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

74. “In her speech, which she was barely paying attention to, she meandered down a list of other names, from here or at home. The person she really wanted to thank was herself. She had fought for this, her engineered longevity allowing her to carry the debate across several natural human lifetimes. She had clashed in the financiers’ rooms and in the laboratories, at academic symposiums and on mass entertainment feeds just to make this happen.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

75. “Complex life was merely the recent froth over a great vat of prokaryotes feeding and dividing and dying.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

76. “Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

77. “That was the problem with associating with criminals. It led to Newtonian espionage. Each action produced an equal and opposite reaction and you couldn’t use without being used in turn.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

78. “Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

79. “Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

80. “Do I say ‘This is where it starts?’ There’s nowhere where it starts. Life is constant creation, change and destruction. The trick is knowing one from the other.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

81. “Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

82. “Olian Timo was harder to get rid of than a venereal disease working for the Hugh tax office.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

83. “The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature, you tedious little primitives.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

84. “It’s a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

85. “Perhaps it was survival rather than victory, but sometimes just surviving was your definition of a win.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

86. “Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

87. “These feelings are just recruiting allies of convenience from my rational mind, like a mob lifting up a momentary demagogue who may be discarded a moment later in favour of a better. Even in the grip of my feelings I can still acknowledge all this, and it doesn’t help. Know thyself, the wise man wrote, and yet I know myself, none better, and the knowledge gives me no power.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

88. “For I am change. I am the flag of the future and the scourge of the past. The old order is the phoenix egg I am born from, but to fly I may have to burn them, or they will clip my wings.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

89. “You are made of My will, and you are made of the technology of that other world, but all of this has been to speed you on a path you might have taken without me, given time and opportunity. You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

90. “Telling people to go to hell in such a way that they enjoy the trip,” the Hiver supplied. “It’s been a privilege having you on the diplomatic staff.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

91. “I am overwhelmed by a terrible sadness, but it’s a good sadness in a way. It isn’t the leaden weight of my own self-pity and misery, the biochemical fallout of malfunctioning metabolism and cognition that just casts a dour filter over everything, whether there’s cause or not. I am sad for Lynesse Fourth Daughter, trying to be something that never existed in the world, and failing because it’s impossible, and trying again.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

92. “It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

93. “In Holsten’s experience, a classicist’s dream was far more about letting someone else do the dangerous work, and then sitting back to write erudite analyses of the works of the ancients or, increasingly as his career had progressed, of other academics’ writings.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

94. “Empathy is the cornerstone of what her composite people have made together.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

95. “Magic knows not light or darkness. It is the Power Elemental, that predates any such concerns,” he told her archly, somewhat sabotaged by the smug smirk that always crept onto his face when he was pontificating. “Besides, what need we fear the Dark, when we have you to show us the way to the Light?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

96. “Kittering looked up from the display. ‘I am mistaken as a spokesman for an entire species. Very non-cosmopolitan.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

97. “The conspiracy theorist’s dream, the cabal of the mighty getting together to obliterate the bulk of humanity just so they could be kings of what remained.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

98. “Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

99. “World peace, man. Forever and forever.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

100. “We’re getting along platonically just exactly fine.” Meaning we spent all afternoon throwing things at Plato and it was hilarious.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky