Top 250 Becky Chambers Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I can’t always speak my mind, not if I want to get the things I need or go places I need to go. Everything I do, every word I say, is calculated to make people comfortable. To make them respect me. None of it is a lie, but it is an act, and it’s one that gets very, very tiring.”

— Becky Chambers

152. “So, we’re smarter than our remnants, is what you’re saying.” Mosscap gave a slow nod. “If we choose to be.”

— Becky Chambers

153. “For anybody who could use a break.”

— Becky Chambers

154. “The robot looked a touch offended. “I would never call you just an animal, Sibling Dex.” It turned its gaze to the road, head held high. “We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”

— Becky Chambers

155. “What do you need?” Mosscap asked. “Tea,” Dex said. Caffeine, they thought, grabbing a few of their jars. They had a feeling they were going to need it.”

— Becky Chambers

156. “Fear is miserable, as is pain. As is hunger. Every animal is hardwired to do absolutely anything to stop those feelings as fast as possible. We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid. It wasn’t the elk’s fault. The elk just.”

— Becky Chambers

157. “What kind of books does Ms. Amelia collect?” “Oh, entirely pornography,” Mosscap said. “It was very educational.”

— Becky Chambers

158. “There was no law that was just in every situation, no blanket rule that could apply to everyone, no explanation that accounted for every component. This did not mean that laws and rules were not helpful, or that explanations should not be sought, but rather that there should be no fear in changing them as needed, for nothing in the universe ever held still.”

— Becky Chambers

159. “But I’m not a moth. I’m human. And in humans, there are far more stages than just two. I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself. I might not be able to return to the other Ariadnes, but I would not always be the Ariadne floating in front of the mirror, either.”

— Becky Chambers

160. “We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.”

— Becky Chambers

161. “So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.”

— Becky Chambers

162. “If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves.”

— Becky Chambers

163. “Dex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing.”

— Becky Chambers

164. “My mind felt quiet, at last. But the feeling was so precious, that I was reluctant to accept it. I had become so accustomed to the cacophony that part of me perversely wished for it, more trusting of unending discord than peace that could be snatched away.”

— Becky Chambers

165. “Knowledge should always be free,’ she said. ‘What people do with it is up to them.”

— Becky Chambers

166. “The cheap knick-knack in his hands now carried with it a sentiment of the present he would cherish, and a reminder of the past he would always loathe. Only the finest art could accomplish both those things at once.”

— Becky Chambers

167. “You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it.”

— Becky Chambers

168. “It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward.”

— Becky Chambers

169. “If you understand that robots’ lack of purpose – our refusal of your purpose – is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy in seeking the opposite?”

— Becky Chambers

170. “What if that is enough, for now? What if we’re both trying to answer something much too big before we’ve answered the small thing we should have started with? What if it’s enough to just be... Us.”

— Becky Chambers

171. “But you can’t fix everything with cake.”

— Becky Chambers

172. “I cannot tell you what a constant relief it is, even decades after I left, to be in places where I can say something like that freely.’ Speaker had a word for how she felt right then: eerekere. A moment of vulnerable understanding between strangers.”

— Becky Chambers

173. “And sometimes fear is good. Fear keeps you alive. But it can also keep you from what you really want.”

— Becky Chambers

174. “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.”

— Becky Chambers

175. “Robots, they’ll remind you, possessed no self-aware tendencies whatsoever when they were first deployed, and were originally intended as a supplement to the human workforce, not as the full replacement they became.”

— Becky Chambers

176. “The airlock opened before me, edgeless vacuity beyond. There were no winds here, no crashing waves. Only the cold constancy of stars, to which I was just a crude bit of wet carbon, a flake of skin you brush aside. My pain and pettiness and mistakes and inadequacies did not matter. I did not matter. Nothing we did out here mattered. Nothing we could or would ever do would matter, in the face of this.”

— Becky Chambers

177. “I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”

— Becky Chambers

178. “Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.”

— Becky Chambers

179. “I read a book while you were sleeping,” Mosscap said, holding up its pocket computer. “And I would really like to discuss it with you.” Dex blinked twice. “You woke me up to talk about a book?”

— Becky Chambers

180. “Possessing knowledge and performing an action are two entirely different processes.”

— Becky Chambers

181. “There was a difference between being shy and being sequestered. Rarely in history had things turned out well for people who chose to lock themselves away.”

— Becky Chambers

182. “It felt, in that moment, like time had compressed, like history was no longer segmented into Ages and Eras, but here, living, now.”

— Becky Chambers

183. “Life was fluid, gradient, ever shifting.”

— Becky Chambers

184. “I had become so accustomed to the cacophony that part of me perversely wished for it, more trusting of unending discord than peace that could be snatched away.”

— Becky Chambers

185. “People – a group comprised of every sapient species, organic or otherwise – were chaos, but chaos was good. Chaos was the only sensible conclusion.”

— Becky Chambers

186. “It was always a strange thing coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd then to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past? How could this place still be there if the you that once lived there no longer existed?”

— Becky Chambers

187. “Well, that’s the nice thing about trees,” Mosscap put its hands on its hips as it looked around. “They’re not going anywhere. You can take all the time you need to get to know them.”

— Becky Chambers

188. “The gendered expectations of parenting were dissolving, but even though women could be found working in creches now, there was still an enormous difference between the person who produced an egg and the person who cared for the little being that crawled out of it.”

— Becky Chambers

189. “There is peace out here in the open. I have friends and a garden in the stars and a kitchen full of tasty things.”

— Becky Chambers

190. “You and I – we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

— Becky Chambers

191. “Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature, and the ocean was barely touched at all. It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others. But then, humans had a knack for throwing things out of balance. Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.”

— Becky Chambers

192. “Roveg was nothing if not a champion of playing one’s own tune, but there were some areas in which individuality stopped being a virtue and became more of a game of chance.”

— Becky Chambers

193. “We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid.”

— Becky Chambers

194. “They pulled out their pocket computer, as was their habit first thing, dimly aware of the hope that always spurred them to do so – that there might be something good there, something exciting or nourishing, something that would replace the weariness.”

— Becky Chambers

195. “I do not have a purpose any more than a mouse or a slug or a thornbush does. Why do you have to have one in order to feel content?”

— Becky Chambers

196. “I appreciate the intent. I really do. But if you don’t want to infringe upon my agency, let me have agency.”

— Becky Chambers

197. “Hope isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about how you approach it.”

— Becky Chambers

198. “If you have everything you need around you,” Dex said, “there’s no reason to leave. It takes a lot of time and effort to go someplace else.”

— Becky Chambers

199. “This one choice didn’t answer everything for her, not even close. How could it? Life was never a matter of one decision alone. Life was just a bunch of tiny steps, one after another, each a conclusion that lead to a dozen questions more.”

— Becky Chambers

200. “We should’ve known better, as students of the universe. There’s no escaping entropy.”

— Becky Chambers