Top 250 Becky Chambers Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

226. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

236. “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

237. “A place where a person had ample space to stretch one’s own thoughts while still benefiting from the reassuring company of others at a distance.”

— Becky Chambers

238. “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

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

— Becky Chambers

240. “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

241. “The enhanced call us misfits – people who don’t fir their intended purpose. So maybe you’re a misfit too. Doesn’t mean you’re not deserving. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.”

— Becky Chambers

242. “All of your histories are the same, in essence. They’re all stories of animals warring and clashing because you can’t agree on what you’re for, or why you exist.”

— Becky Chambers

243. “She wished someone would give her that sort of attention on a whim. She wished she were confident enough to give it back.”

— Becky Chambers

244. “The robot cocked its rectangular head at Dex. “How do you know when you’re satisfied?”

— Becky Chambers

245. “With effort, they turned the wagon around and headed for a road they’d never seen before. What are you doing? they thought. The hell are you doing? I don’t know, they replied with a nervous grin. I have no idea.”

— Becky Chambers

246. “She closed her eyes and let out a tremendous sigh. Her shoulders visibly slumped. She’d always had the ability to relax them; she’d just needed permission to do so.”

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers

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

— Becky Chambers