Top 250 Becky Chambers Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

207. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

214. “I miss the sorts of gatherings that call for coffee.”

— Becky Chambers

215. “Of how any sighted individual’s perception of the world is entirely based on the way the structures in their eyes receive light.” Mosscap smiled at Dex. “I wish I could borrow your eyes for a day, see what that’s like.” “Please find a less creepy way to phrase that.”

— Becky Chambers

216. “They still loved performing tea service – or at least, they loved what it had been. But as they tried to connect to what had once been so captivating, they felt nothing but yawning absence. A void where they’d once been filled.”

— Becky Chambers

217. “I’m not sure whether that’s tragic or whether you’ve been spared a lot of bother.”

— Becky Chambers

218. “It simply looked like the efforts of someone who was doing what they could with what they had. For all his love of aesthetics, Roveg could respect that. Sometimes all you could do was make it work.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

220. “There was no way of knowing who would need what, and so it was best to carry everything.”

— Becky Chambers

221. “Clear divisions between right and wrong were rare in her work.”

— Becky Chambers

222. “I didn’t expect my life to be ending yet, but I suppose it always comes as a surprise, doesn’t it?”

— Becky Chambers

223. “Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin!”

— Becky Chambers

224. “We are ready to live out our lives without ever seeing Earth again. We’re happy to do it. It is the most natural end I can imagine, the best death I could hope for. But we can’t accept that fate if no one is ready to pick up where we left off. If we die out here with your blessing, then we die as your family. If we die without it, we die alone.”

— Becky Chambers

225. “Where do you want to go? I couldn’t answer that. There was nowhere to go. There was nowhere but this. There would never be anything but this.”

— Becky Chambers

226. “It’s not my place to debate different flavors of belief in the places I visit,” they said.”

— Becky Chambers

227. “Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to power thought?”

— Becky Chambers

228. “I’m not telling you that everything will be all right,′ he said. I’m telling you I understand how horrible it feels to be able to do nothing.”

— Becky Chambers

229. “They’d strapped themselves into this explosive hunk of scrap and aimed for the sky. How was this a good idea? How had anyone ever thought this was a good idea?”

— Becky Chambers

230. “He knew there would never be a point in his life in which he knew everything there was to know, and while part of him despaired at the puzzle that would never be solved, the rest of him embraced this truth fully, for what satisfaction could there be in having nothing else to ask?”

— Becky Chambers

231. “The thing was, she’d spent so much time focused on what could go wrong, she’d forgotten the possibility of something going right.”

— Becky Chambers

232. “His bed was low and spacious – easy to fall into, hard to get out of.”

— Becky Chambers

233. “I was operating on the hope that such things wouldn’t matter when the sky is falling apart.’ ‘Such things shouldn’t matter at all, regardless of what the sky is doing.”

— Becky Chambers

234. “I know about a lot of things, but only a little in each regard.”

— Becky Chambers

235. “We were no longer riding a spacecraft, but a tiny bird, caught in a vast pit of tar, beating her wings so hard she risked leaving a piece of herself behind.”

— Becky Chambers

236. “You found something dark within your own house, and you are wondering how much of it has rubbed off on you.”

— Becky Chambers

237. “The thing every being fears most is the only thing that’s for certain?”

— Becky Chambers

238. “I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s often misused, operating on the false interpretation that fit means physically fit, therefore expressing a dog-eat-dog ethos. The strongest wins the day. But that’s not what Darwin meant, not at all. He meant most suited to, as in, the creatures most suited to – or most fit for – a specific environment are the ones with the best chance of passing on their genes.”

— Becky Chambers

239. “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

240. “Just because there’s no one living on a planet does not mean it’s yours for the taking. Do you not see how dangerous that mindset is? Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy?”

— Becky Chambers

241. “Perhaps none of us can truly explain death. Perhaps none of us should.”

— Becky Chambers

242. “You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be. I say that wherever I go.” They threw a hand toward their wagon, its wooden sides emblazoned with the summer bear. “It’s painted on the side of my home! But I don’t feel like it’s true, for me. I feel like it’s true for everyone else but not me. I feel like I have to do more than that. Like I have a responsibility to do more than that.”

— Becky Chambers

243. “It’s one thing to be told about the world that was. It’s another to see a piece it.”

— Becky Chambers

244. “Humans had a long, storied history of forcing their way into places where they didn’t belong.”

— Becky Chambers

245. “And that’s what I like about you, Speaker. You don’t have any problem telling anybody exactly who you are.’ Speaker cocked her head at him. ‘Yes, I do. Of course I do. 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

246. “We’re coming in at their happy ending and not stopping to think about how they got there. We want to take on their story. And we can, if we want to. But I worry about those who think adopting someone else’s story means abandoning their own.”

— Becky Chambers

247. “Reflexes kept a person safe, but they could also make you stupid.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

249. “In traditional Aeluon culture, a mother was not a parent. Parents were men and shon. Parents went to school for it. Parents were the people who actually raised children, not those who had done the easy business of creating them.”

— Becky Chambers

250. “I forcibly conjured memories of that lush world, but they had become bittersweet. I knew that those smiles would fade, those adventures would end. All days on Mirabilis led to Opera. To look at them was to look back on the path that had led to howling and skittering and sleepless nights. The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.”

— Becky Chambers