Top 250 Becky Chambers Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “The mirror knows you’re anxious to see yourself – but take your time, it says. I’m here when you’re ready, and not a second before. It is the kindest object placement I’ve ever seen.”

— Becky Chambers

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

156. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

158. “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

159. “Aeluon women didn’t have breasts, but after meeting Pei, Ashby had found that he could do without. His teenage self would’ve been horrified.”

— Becky Chambers

160. “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

161. “He no longer felt helplessness. He felt powerful. And that was what scared him.”

— Becky Chambers

162. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

164. “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

165. “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

166. “The human body can adapt to almost anything, but it is deceptively selective about the way it does so.”

— 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. “If you’re focused on moving from sign to sign, there’s no opportunity for happy accidents.”

— Becky Chambers

169. “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

170. “We have found nothing you can sell. We have found nothing you can put to practical use. We have found no worlds that could be easily or ethically settled, were that end desired. We have satisfied nothing but curiosity, gained nothing but knowledge.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

173. “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

174. “I’m sorry, but I can’t accept a lesser evil for the sake of it being lesser.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

176. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

183. “A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.”

— Becky Chambers

184. “How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?”

— Becky Chambers

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

188. “I highly doubt many of them will feel that way, and anyway, you don’t have to worry about that.” “Why not?” Dex smiled reassuringly. “Because I’ll be with you the whole way.”

— Becky Chambers

189. “What that perspective is, I have no idea. But you’ll find one. Otherwise, you’ll only ever think about other people in the abstract. That’s a poisonous thing, thinking your way is all there is.”

— Becky Chambers

190. “You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply.”

— Becky Chambers

191. “She was losing a day of shore leave because of this, and that definitely soured her mood, but she was sure things were far worse for others with strict schedules and urgent business. No one had died, as far as she knew. No one in her immediate locale was hurt. Still, though, harm was harm, and she found herself wrestling between two truths until she realised neither was a zero-sum: This wasn’t the worst that could happen. It was a bad thing all the same.”

— Becky Chambers

192. “You know how it is; sometimes you just want to have a moment between yourself and a turtle and no one else.”

— Becky Chambers

193. “Everything else breaks down and is made into other things.”

— Becky Chambers

194. “If trying something new was valid, then keeping something old was, too.”

— Becky Chambers

195. “I want everybody to get along, and I want to make them dessert,’ she said quietly.”

— Becky Chambers

196. “She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death 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

197. “And yet, if they were completely honest, the thing they had come to look forward to most was not the smiles nor the gifts nor the sense of work well done, but the part that came after all of that. The part when they returned to their wagon, shut themself inside, and spent a few precious, shapeless hours entirely alone. Why wasn’t it enough?”

— Becky Chambers

198. “He’d been taught that if one person had more than another, feeling guilty about it was the least productive reaction. The only proper way to approach such inequities was to figure out how best to wield them, so as to bring others up to where you stood.”

— Becky Chambers

199. “Don’t you worry. It’s a kick in the head, but it’s a fun kick in the head.”

— Becky Chambers

200. “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