Top 280 Becky Chambers Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

207. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you?”

— Becky Chambers

214. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

216. “Despite these blessings, sometimes Dex could not sleep. In those hours, they frequently asked themself what it was they were doing. They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. They kept doing it all the same.”

— Becky Chambers

217. “I wish I could understand experiences I’m incapable of having.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “How had something as crude as us ever come from something so beautiful?”

— Becky Chambers

236. “Repeating history that had left living memory was an all-too-human tendency.”

— Becky Chambers

237. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

239. “To teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate. – 1977, Voyager Golden Record.”

— Becky Chambers

240. “No one should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don’t have the right number next to their name.”

— Becky Chambers

241. “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

242. “Tea service wasn’t anything arcane. People came to the wagon with their problems and left with a fresh-brewed cup. Dex had taken respite in tea parlors plenty of times, as everyone did, and they’d read plenty of books about the particulars of the practice. Endless electronic ink had been spilled over the old tradition, but all of it could be boiled down to listen to people, give tea. Uncomplicated as could be.”

— Becky Chambers

243. “Life isn’t fair, and laws usually aren’t, either.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

245. “Emotions left unchecked could so easily metastasise, and she worked hard to never be that personally negligent.”

— Becky Chambers

246. “What do humans need? is an unanswerable question. That changes from person to person, minute to minute. We can’t predict our needs, beyond the base things we require to survive.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

248. “The robot thought. “I have wants and ambitions too, Sibling Dex. But if I fulfill none of them, that’s okay. I wouldn’t – ” It nodded at Dex’s cuts and bruises, at the bug bites and dirty clothes. “I wouldn’t beat myself up over it.” Dex turned the mug over and over in their hands. “It doesn’t bother you?” Dex said. “The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?” “That’s true for all life I’ve observed. Why would it bother me?” Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

250. “Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was. Find the strength to do both.”

— Becky Chambers