Top 40 Arkady Martine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.”

— Arkady Martine

2. “THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.”

— Arkady Martine

3. “This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.”

— Arkady Martine

4. “A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.”

— Arkady Martine

5. “I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems.”

— Arkady Martine

6. “The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.”

— Arkady Martine

7. “Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.”

— Arkady Martine

8. “Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.”

— Arkady Martine

9. “I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.”

— Arkady Martine

10. “Perhaps succor was enough to keep a whole population trapped, willingly.”

— Arkady Martine

11. “Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.”

— Arkady Martine

12. “The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.”

— Arkady Martine

13. “So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,” said Three Seagrass. “Who we model ourselves on, which epic, which poem. Neurological enhancements are cheating.”

— Arkady Martine

14. “Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli version of a grin. “Work food. Anything that’s too delicious to eat slow.” “And then you get back to the job faster?” “You’re getting the idea.”

— Arkady Martine

15. “Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.”

— Arkady Martine

16. “I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”

— Arkady Martine

17. “An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”

— Arkady Martine

18. “When Three Seagrass kissed her, Mahit opened up for her as if she was a lotus floating in one of the City’s gardens at dawn – slow, inexorable, like she had been waiting a long, long time through the night.”

— Arkady Martine

19. “The adjutant, Twenty Cicada, made an entirely remarkable noise, like he’d drowned a laugh and swallowed its corpse.”

— Arkady Martine

20. “She’s a barbarian, but don’t hold it against her. She’s brilliant.”

— Arkady Martine

21. “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.”

— Arkady Martine

22. “She had begun petting the Kauraanian kitten, and it purred like it wanted to be a starship engine when it grew up.”

— Arkady Martine

23. “And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.”

— Arkady Martine

24. “An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”

— Arkady Martine

25. “She’d meant, ‘When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no.’ She’d meant, ‘When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to.’ She’d meant, ‘You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free.’ Free to choose, or free otherwise.”

— Arkady Martine

26. “She didn’t know what to do, and Yskandr didn’t know what to do, and Three Seagrass was going to keep hurting her like she had yesterday, keep thinking of her as ‘my clever barbarian’ and not as Mahit Dzmare, no matter how many times they kissed, and there was no such thing as safety and no such thing as going home.”

— Arkady Martine

27. “Then she did reach out to touch Mahit, her fingertips like a ghost, brushing over her cheekbone. Mahit shivered helplessly, and went very still: like she was waiting for a blow.”

— Arkady Martine

28. “Three Seagrass had taken her hands away from her face, and the expression which was growing there was one that Mahit had seen before: it was Three Seagrass focusing inward, preparing to bend the universe around her will, because all other options were untenable.”

— Arkady Martine

29. “Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.”

— Arkady Martine

30. “Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past – a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.”

— Arkady Martine

31. “Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that.”

— Arkady Martine

32. “I am the person who spends a great deal of time on the intricacies of interstellar communication through jumpgates – a process, Your Excellency, which is so very automated and regular that my time is absolutely most valuably spent on informing you about it. Would you like to come into a conference room?” One Cyclamen was amazingly obsequious, and in such a way that Eight Antidote felt more flattered than annoyed. He wished he could learn that skill.”

— Arkady Martine

33. “But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors.”

— Arkady Martine

34. “How good is Information at raising the dead?” “It isn’t my specialty,” Three Seagrass said. “The yaotlek is expecting all of us in the medical bay morgue,” Twenty Cicada confirmed, ignoring all insinuations of necromantic powers.”

— Arkady Martine

35. “And she missed home, missed planetrise above the Station, and being clever and ambitious and not responsible yet, talking to Shrja Torel and her other friends in the ninth-tier station bars, imagining what they might do and not actually having to do it.”

— Arkady Martine

36. “Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.”

— Arkady Martine

37. “Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.”

— Arkady Martine

38. “We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known without singing... We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known with language only, and still clearly... Language is not so transparent... language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.”

— Arkady Martine

39. “It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.”

— Arkady Martine

40. “It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts.”

— Arkady Martine

41. “There wasn’t an iota of Information Ministry training that covered tripartite negotiations from the bridge of a Fleet flagship, where one of the negotiating parties wasn’t even human and one of the others wasn’t Teixcalaanli, and none of the parties were Information agents except the negotiator. She should write a procedure manual. If she lived long enough to be that bored.”

— Arkady Martine

42. “A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.”

— Arkady Martine