Top 200 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

102. “Aklu’s doing a thing.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

103. “You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

104. “I’m trying to keep track of all the ways this venture is likely to kill me but, yes, that’s one of them.’ She looked up at him without flinching. ‘Seriously, I am more concerned about that satellite. You need to cut us free right now. You need me isolating the ship’s systems so that thing can’t just walk in and take over.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Being in its presence was weirdly fatiguing for Uncharles. He had never encountered another robot with so many undirected tics and mannerisms. Processing them was a serious drain on his system resources.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

108. “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

109. “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

110. “Oxygen was – to quote Mikhail Elesco, the team’s top geologist – a needy bastard that couldn’t stand not to be in a relationship, no matter how toxic.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

111. “He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death. It had been a rough few weeks.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

113. “Sage-Archivist Ochelby had a kindly face. It crinkled in pleasant, paternal ways when he was conducting the more demanding tasks his position required. Such as deconstructing primitive magical belief systems – a task that often involved deconstructing primitive magicians.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

114. “Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behaviour for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

117. “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

118. “One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

119. “An ancestress of hers stole the Sacred Eye of the Messenger from the ants, back when the ants were the great power in the world and not merely a convenient operating system to run Avrana Kern on.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

120. “She asks them what they think those lights in the sky are: those below are astronomers enough to know that they are unthinkably distant fires. They are like your sun, she says. And around one such was a world much like your own, on which other eyes looked up at those distant lights, and wondered if anything looked back down.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

121. “You want to fling yourself forwards past the badlands of the war, this is where you end up. And I’ll be waiting for you. Nobody gets by me.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

122. “You wouldn’t,” the Maric whispers and God lifts an eyebrow because the one thing every man of faith should know is that you don’t tempt the divine.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

124. “On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is,” Gethli tells her. “We tend towards the latter. We know we don’t think, so why should anything else?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

125. “And he was a false prophet if anyone was. He was the debased currency of patriotism.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

126. “The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

127. “I want to try something a bit lateral,’ Holsten explained. ‘Is it likely to get us blown up ahead of schedule?’ ‘I don’t think so.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

128. “What’s the point of making better people, if they’re still sad and afraid and lonely?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

129. “I could do such things, what they are I yet know not, but they would be the terror of the Earth.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

130. “Ah, yes, hindsight, always my weapon of choice.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

131. “The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

132. “Take away my machines and they would be at each other’s throats with swords and knives instead. Then take away their steel and they would pick up rocks and clubs. There is no saving them: they are merely the fuel for war’s engines. Only we, Totho – we are the point, the reason. We, because, alone amongst this destruction, we create, and we create so that they may destroy, so that we may create anew.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

133. “Knowledge. New, shiny things. Better thinkers than we have observed that, when you reach this level of post-scarcity civilization, it’s either wallow in your own excesses forever or seek out newness. Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

134. “God is better disposed towards those who feign the right humility.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

135. “New food. Different food. That had everyone’s interest. Across the span of the web, that was strung in mistlike sheets from tree to tree across their forest, he felt the others rousing, rising from their torpor. There was always food, even for so many bodies as Mother’s Brood ran to, but variety was welcome.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

136. “She found the smile she kept for him, and just for him.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

137. “Change is a bastard, as any disnosaur will tell you.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

138. “He had bred them and mutated them and played all sorts of God, and now they wanted to know why and he had no answer.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

139. “Dictators don’t make the trains run on time, Rufus. They run down the rail networks because they travel in private planes.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

140. “His previous triangulation data informed him that they were come nigh unto the Kingdom of Heaven. Which Nietzschean compass indicated that God was dead ahead.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

141. “In his own mind, Senkovi was known for his sense of humour, an organ that in truth amused only himself.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

142. “Intelligent aliens might introduce a level of moral complexity that would compromise operational efficiency. Cynical of me to think about it in that way, I know, but there was always a good commercial use-case for minimizing the potential rights of whoever’s environment you were destroying.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

143. “Sitting in that cell with him as he wheezed his last hours away, I could feel my presence eroding, the desert wind smoothing over all the footprints I had ever made.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

144. “We know the drudgery of being surrounded by all that unceasing banality.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

145. “There’s a thing on Earth, a marine isopod, that eats the tongues of fish and then replaces them so it can keep on stealing the fish’s food. But to do so, it has to be a fish tongue as its second job. It’s good enough at it that the fish goes on living, and maybe, because the new independent tongue has a load of little scrabbly arms, it’s actually better than the old one.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

146. “The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

147. “So who the hell is it who gets to name God? Or did it name itself? Wait, is this the computer that they built to say whether there’s a God or not and when they turn it on it tells them that now there is? Because, great idea for a story, sure, but history is full of people saying they’re God, and in retrospect they were all liars.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

148. “A dagger of ambition in the sheath of a generous uncle with a pocket full of sweets.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

149. “What can be so urgent? Some of the crew always think of war, when it comes down to this, but what war? What is there to fight over, in a universe that is bigger than even we can ever exhaust, with more of anything than we could ever need?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

150. “They were part of the problem, even though they never actively did bad things to people. They just benefited from all the bad things that had been done.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky