Top 120 Ann Leckie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else.”

— Ann Leckie

2. “The point is, there is no point. Choose your own!”

— Ann Leckie

3. “An ancillary body might feel momentarily overwhelmed, or irritable, or any emotion one might think of – it was only natural, bodies felt things. But it was so very small, when it was just one segment among the others, when, even in the grip of strong emotion or physical discomfort, that segment knew it was only one of many, knew the rest of itself was there to help.”

— Ann Leckie

4. “Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin.”

— Ann Leckie

5. “I am the Strength and Patience of the Hill! And I am the god of Vastai, who until now has sustained Iraden! And you, little snake, will not be the first god I have killed. No, nor even the second.”

— Ann Leckie

6. “In a thousand years, Lieutenant, nothing you care about will matter. Not even to you – you’ll be dead. So will I, and no one alive will care. Maybe – just maybe – someone will remember our names. More likely those names will be engraved on some dusty memorial pin at the bottom of an old box no one ever opens.”

— Ann Leckie

7. “There is always more after the ending. Always the next morning, and the next. Always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, larges as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Everything ending is from another angle, not really an ending.”

— Ann Leckie

8. “Memory is an event horizon What’s caught in it is gone but it’s always there.”

— Ann Leckie

9. “Don’t forget your shoes, miss.”

— Ann Leckie

10. “We have a saying, where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.”

— Ann Leckie

11. “In the end it’s only ever been one step, and then the next.”

— Ann Leckie

12. “Get some rest. Kalr will bring supper to your quarters. Things will seem better after you’ve eaten and slept.” “Really?” she asked. Bitter and challenging. “Well, not necessarily,” I admitted. “But it’s easier to deal with things when you’ve had some rest and some breakfast.”

— Ann Leckie

13. “I will always, always thank my local libraries: the St. Louis County Library, the Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County, the St. Louis Public Library, the Webster University Library, and the University of Missouri–St. Louis Thomas Jefferson Library. And all you interlibrary loan librarians out there – thanks for what you do! Libraries are a public good. Please support yours in whatever way you can.”

— Ann Leckie

14. “Didn’t Notai ships usually have long names? Like Ineluctable Ascendancy of Mind Unfolding or The Finite Contains the Infinite Contains the Finite?” Both of those ship names were fictional, characters in more or less famous melodramatic entertainments.”

— Ann Leckie

15. “Death will overtake us In whatever manner already fated Everyone falls to it And so long as I’m ready I don’t fear it No matter what form it takes.”

— Ann Leckie

16. “If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference.”

— Ann Leckie

17. “When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?”

— Ann Leckie

18. “She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak – my own first language – doesn’t mark gender in any way.”

— Ann Leckie

19. “It’s personal.” It was just that with me personal affected a great many others.”

— Ann Leckie

20. “You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side.”

— Ann Leckie

21. “Those green fields we’d flown over, all that tea, the complicated production, was not a matter of maximizing cost efficiency – no, the point of Daughter of Fishes was prestige.”

— Ann Leckie

22. “Half your anger is for yourself.” She ate the last bite of pastry and brushed her small gloved hands together, showering fragments of sugar icing onto the grass. “But it’s such a monumentally enormous anger even half is quite devastating.”

— Ann Leckie

23. “It’s so easy to go along with things, isn’t it?” Skaaiat said. “Especially when, as you say, it profits you.”

— Ann Leckie

24. “From a child I was taught to forgive and forget, but it’s difficult to forget these things, the loss of parents, of children and grandchildren.”

— Ann Leckie

25. “I knew and cared nothing about the will of the gods. I only knew that I would land where I myself had been cast, wherever that would be.”

— Ann Leckie

26. “So it really isn’t as bad as I thought it was at first,” observed Nuncle Lak, after the briefest silence. “It’s worse.”

— Ann Leckie

27. “You wanted to flee the room, back out onto the stairs, but you made yourself circle me two more times. Frowning, trying to understand. As you walked around me I said, “Now, Eolo, can you hear me?”

— Ann Leckie

28. “Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.”

— Ann Leckie

29. “Dear Miss Ingray, thank you for saving my life. When I grow up I will work for you. I am good at math and I know how to cook noodles.”

— Ann Leckie

30. “I greatly fear’, Citizen Fosyf said before I could answer, ’that the fleet captain’s interests are musical rather than spiritual. She’s only interested if there’s singing.”

— Ann Leckie

31. “Please, sir.” Tisarwat seemed not to have heard either of them. “We can’t leave things the way they are, and I have an idea.” That got the translator’s full attention. She looked up from the game, frowned intently at Tisarwat. “What’s it like? Does it hurt?” Tisarwat only blinked at her. “Sometimes I think I might like to get an idea, but then it occurs to me that it’s exactly the sort of thing Dlique would do.”

— Ann Leckie

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

— Ann Leckie

33. “Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.”

— Ann Leckie

34. “You don’t need to know the odds. You need to know how to do the thing you’re trying to do. And then you need to do it.”

— Ann Leckie

35. “I will share one of them with you now: most people don’t want trouble, but frightened people are liable to do very dangerous things.”

— Ann Leckie

36. “Have a beer instead.”

— Ann Leckie

37. “These people are citizens.” I replied, my voice as calm and even as I could make it, without reaching the dead tonelessness of an ancillary. “When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?”

— Ann Leckie

38. “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.”

— Ann Leckie

39. “No real endings, no final perfect happiness, no irredeemable despair. Meetings, yes, breakfasts and suppers.”

— Ann Leckie

40. “If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is.”

— Ann Leckie

41. “I didn’t get where I am by having reasonable goals.”

— Ann Leckie

42. “I came to see her strangely serene manner as both a sign of just how much she expected to get whatever she wanted, and also an instrument by which she managed to do that, plain persistent saying what she wanted to be true in the expectation that it would eventually become so. It’s a method I’d found worked best for those who are already positioned to mostly get what they want. Obviously Fosyf had found it worked for her.”

— Ann Leckie

43. “It’s always for show, Citizen. It is entirely possible to grieve with no outward sign. These things are meant to let others know about it.”

— Ann Leckie

44. “I don’t think that story communicates the point you seem to imagine it does.”

— Ann Leckie

45. “You call that rest, do you?” asked Medic. “Up until the bomb went off, yes.”

— Ann Leckie

46. “Say exactly what we told you to and nothing will go wrong, they said. Well, it all went wrong anyway. And they didn’t say anything about this. You’d think they might have, they said lots of other things. Sit up straight, Dlique. Don’t dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn’t nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique.” She scowled a moment, as though that last one particularly rankled.”

— Ann Leckie

47. “Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense.”

— Ann Leckie

48. “I thought also of those gods I’d seen in the time before humans had existed, who could not have possibly spoken a human language and yet had wielded great power. Could it be that language was not the source of the power, but one possible tool for using that power?”

— Ann Leckie

49. “The tyrant had said our backgrounds were similar, and in some ways they were.”

— Ann Leckie

50. “They were prepared to be disgusted with her ignorance, a baby fresh from training, a matter for mocking and exasperation, yes. But also for sympathy, and some anticipatory pride. Her Bos would be able to claim credit for any of Tisarwat’s future accomplishments, because after all they would have raised her. Taught her anything she knew that was really important. They were prepared to be hers. Wanted very much for her to turn out to be the sort of lieutenant they would be proud to serve under.”

— Ann Leckie