Top 250 Becky Chambers Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She was glad to have met someone who liked to read.”

— Becky Chambers

52. “Most sapients confuse working hard with being miserable.”

— Becky Chambers

53. “That Humans make everything needlessly difficult.” Ashby.”

— Becky Chambers

54. “At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.”

— Becky Chambers

55. “Ridiculous, I know. I don’t pretend to understand. Frankly, I find the whole notion absurd. But you know what I realized? It doesn’t matter what I think. Jenks thinks something different, and his pain is very real right now. Me knowing how stupid this whole thing is doesn’t make him hurt any less.” “We –.”

— Becky Chambers

56. “That’s such an incredibly organic bias, the idea that your squishy physical existence is some sort of pinnacle that all programs aspire to.”

— Becky Chambers

57. “The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.”

— Becky Chambers

58. “I cannot wait for her to stop being a teenager.” “I can,” Nib said. “Do you know how impossible it’s going to be to boss her around when she’s twenty?”

— Becky Chambers

59. “It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you’re stuck on – the most vital criteria of home and health and safety – remain unanswered?”

— Becky Chambers

60. “The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.”

— Becky Chambers

61. “Just because someone goes away doesn’t mean you stop loving them.”

— Becky Chambers

62. “Jack is a swagger, a wink, a final aced even though he’s never been to class, a joint smoked in bed after a day in the field, a rock climbed and an ocean swum.”

— Becky Chambers

63. “Even unpleasant bastards like us deserve company.’ He smirked. ‘That’s a quote from my wife, by the way.”

— Becky Chambers

64. “There were dozens of stars. Dozens of dozens, way too many to count, just like her questions.”

— Becky Chambers

65. “It is difficult to give thought to the stars when the ground is swallowing you up.”

— Becky Chambers

66. “Find the strength to do both.”

— Becky Chambers

67. “We hail from systems that remained self-contained for billions of years, with evolutionary clocks that all began at different times. How is it possible that when meeting our galactic neighbours for the first time, we are all instantly reminded of creatures back home – or in some cases, of ourselves?”

— Becky Chambers

68. “Allalae holds, Allalae warms,” they panted. “Allalae soothes and Allalae charms.”

— Becky Chambers

69. “No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.”

— Becky Chambers

70. “I know how much a world can change within the bookends of a lifetime.”

— Becky Chambers

71. “If I ask what I’m asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then there’s no point in asking at all.”

— Becky Chambers

72. “It was funny how the potential for profit always seemed to trump antipathy.”

— Becky Chambers

73. “Perhaps stars were supposed to be viewed from the ground.”

— Becky Chambers

74. “A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence.”

— Becky Chambers

75. “We’re made out of our ancestors. They’re what keep us alive.”

— Becky Chambers

76. “And seriously, anybody working in a job that doesn’t let you take a nap when you need to should get a new job.”

— Becky Chambers

77. “When I see the ocean, I feel calm. It makes me want to’ – to keep eating candy – ’to keep going. To keep trying new things. To keep living.”

— Becky Chambers

78. “You Humans really do cripple yourselves with your belief that you all think in unique ways.”

— Becky Chambers

79. “When the world you know is out of reach, nothing is more welcome than a measurable reminder that it still exists.”

— Becky Chambers

80. “I have never understood potatoes,” Sissix said. “The whole point of a potato is to cover it with salt so you don’t notice how bland it is. Why not just get a salt lick and skip the potato?” “Don’t.”

— Becky Chambers

81. “To some Humans, the promise of a patch land was worth any effort. It was an oddly predictable sort of behavior. Humans had a long, storied history of forcing their way into places where they didn’t belong.”

— Becky Chambers

82. “It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet.”

— Becky Chambers

83. “Tresha. It was the thankful, humble, vulnerable feeling that came after someone saw a truth in you, something they had discovered just by watching, something that you did not admit often to yourself.”

— Becky Chambers

84. “I’ll never understand how the rest of you expect brand-new adults to be able to teach kids how to be people.”

— Becky Chambers

85. “The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.”

— Becky Chambers

86. “And worst of all, we knew this could happen. We’ve been impotently worrying about what a solar flare could do to electronic infrastructure since the 1900s. But my generation was so preoccupied with fixing the mess left by the unaddressed-and-fully-known-about environmental disaster of the previous generation that we committed the same sin of criminal procrastination against yours. I ask no forgiveness for this, because we deserve none.”

— Becky Chambers

87. “Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.”

— Becky Chambers

88. “They were out in the open, for real this time, as spacers should be. And all around them, black, black, black, full of jewelled stars and coloured clouds. It was a sight she knew well, a sight she lived alongside, but in that moment, she was seeing it for the first time. Everything had changed.”

— Becky Chambers

89. “He did not run from his grief, nor did he deny its existence. He could study his grief from a distance, like a scientist observing animals. He embraced it, accepted it, acknowledged that it would never go away. It was as much a part of him as any pleasant feeling. Perhaps even more so.”

— Becky Chambers

90. “She felt as though she could reach out to that little girl and pull her through the years. Look, she’d say. Look who you’re gonna be. Look where you’re gonna go.”

— Becky Chambers

91. “Owl had been good to her. She stayed on the screen by the bed all day, and she taught Jane about something called music, which was a weird bunch of sounds that had no point but made things feel a little better.”

— Becky Chambers

92. “He was not a prisoner of those memories. He was their warden.”

— Becky Chambers

93. “Change is always dangerous.”

— Becky Chambers

94. “We’re our own warning.”

— Becky Chambers

95. “I love learning. I love history. But there’s history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It’s not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes. -Tak.”

— Becky Chambers

96. “These Humans, huh?’ Sissix said to Dr Chef. ‘I took some time to freak out. Didn’t you?’ ‘I sure did,’ Dr Chef said. He handed Rosemary a clean cloth. ‘Once I’d medicated Ashby and got his bots going, I locked myself in my office and yelled for a good ten minutes.’ ‘That’s what that was?’ Ashby said. He had a dim memory of layers upon layers of haunting chords, cutting through the waves of pain. ‘I thought you were singing. It was really pretty.”

— Becky Chambers

97. “The only reason Humans stopped killing each other to the extent that you used to, I think, is because your planet died before you could finish the job.”

— Becky Chambers

98. “I do.’ Pepper nodded seriously. ‘I’d like the left side of the menu, please.”

— Becky Chambers

99. “It was hard to play it cool when you wore your heart on your face.”

— Becky Chambers

100. “As long as I have food in my belly and can buy dumb stuff to decorate my house with, it doesn’t matter whether people are paying me the same amount every time.”

— Becky Chambers