Top 60 C. J. Cherryh Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.”

— C. J. Cherryh

2. “Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!”

— C. J. Cherryh

3. “I most fear stupid people. Stupid people will do anything. Truly smart people will do only what is logical for them to do.”

— C. J. Cherryh

4. “Trade isn’t about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.”

— C. J. Cherryh

5. “Nothing’s hopeless except never trying.”

— C. J. Cherryh

6. “A warrior is free to be a hero and pull off daring do and the soldier is irresponsible if he does it.”

— C. J. Cherryh

7. “Poisoning rarely happens in a well-managed kitchen.”

— C. J. Cherryh

8. “Don’t mourn might-have-beens. Magic can’t work backwards, only forward. I taught you better than that .”

— C. J. Cherryh

9. “Remember, constantly, that when you talk about ‘tense of a subjunctive,’ you’re not talking about time. You’re slipping through degrees of reality.”

— C. J. Cherryh

10. “Average people didn’t analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.”

— C. J. Cherryh

11. “Not advisable is spread thickly over this entire situation.”

— C. J. Cherryh

12. “But, oh, how precious those things were! To look at the sky, breathe the cold wind, have fingers nipped by chill and skin stung red and heart stirred to life, gods, he had been dead until Tristen arrived and asked him the first vexing question, and posed him the first insoluble puzzle, and marveled at hailstones and mourned over falling leaves. What miracles there were all around...”

— C. J. Cherryh

13. “People who do something can always make a mistake. So can people who do nothing.”

— C. J. Cherryh

14. “The world was so beautiful, and there was so much of it: he could gaze forever at the wonder of leaves and not see them all: could inhale the wind and not smell all its scents, hear the sounds of men and horses and not hear all the sounds of the woods, and taste the thousand flavors in stale water and still find it wonderful... because it was not the darkness.”

— C. J. Cherryh

15. “Figure it. If there were two humans, there were two sides, and if both had a pulse, politics would be at work somewhere in the business.”

— C. J. Cherryh

16. “Deal with the Devil if the Devil has a constituency – and don’t complain about the heat.”

— C. J. Cherryh

17. “Never start a war with something you can’t talk to.”

— C. J. Cherryh

18. “The warrior may fight for gold or for an immediate gain, or for something to take home for the winter to feed the family. The soldier is part of a more complex society. He’s fighting for a group ethic of some sort.”

— C. J. Cherryh

19. “A fine lady she weren’t, oh, but a damn fine woman and a brave one...”

— C. J. Cherryh

20. “It lent a Man a certain peace of mind... to ride through threats and terrors unhearing: it even lent a man a certain real protection, for he could not hear temptation and bad advice to be swayed by it, but it was no protection at all when power reached out with tangible results and brought down the lightning.”

— C. J. Cherryh

21. “We are the Face that Looks Outward. We are makers of paths, walkers on the wind.”

— C. J. Cherryh

22. “Watch out for a man whose enemies keep disappearing.”

— C. J. Cherryh

23. “He had read about evil in Efanor’s little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad... but none without self-interest, none he could not understand even in terms of his own will to have his way.”

— C. J. Cherryh

24. “Rattle a lawyer’s door and you get more lawyers.”

— C. J. Cherryh

25. “Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.”

— C. J. Cherryh

26. “Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better.”

— C. J. Cherryh

27. “What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about. Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues; no pictures, no news; no news, no event; no great sympathy on the part of the public nor sustained interest from the media: safe politics for the Company.”

— C. J. Cherryh

28. “Change happened and you thought it was forever, and immediately there were all the enemies of that change making common cause and meeting in the cloakrooms.”

— C. J. Cherryh

29. “Change, son of mine, should be applied like salt to a dish – best taste it, understand it, and then decide.” “Is.”

— C. J. Cherryh

30. “I couldn’t yet see the limits of my life, but he could see the limits of his. His life was thin, and he had a hunger for recognition.”

— C. J. Cherryh

31. “A bizarre hysteria, perhaps, that point which many reached here, when anger was all that mattered. It led to self-destruction.”

— C. J. Cherryh

32. “He was home, but he wasn’t. He had gotten where he had to go, but he hadn’t. He had found out who he was, but he didn’t know why it had failed to satify his questions.”

— C. J. Cherryh

33. “Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics.”

— C. J. Cherryh

34. “Intimidation needs response, bait needs biting. If you do neither, the attacker has nothing to build on.”

— C. J. Cherryh

35. “Belief... was its own magic-so long as it was carefully placed, often examined, like a bridge kept in careful repair.”

— C. J. Cherryh

36. “If you’re up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.”

— C. J. Cherryh

37. “He could be distracted, still, by beauty, by the wonder of a stroke of sunlight. Perhaps at such times he made himself open to wizardry-or conversely, was as warded and safe at such moments as Ynefel at its strongest. Perhaps threats simply slid past his attention and he made himself immune.”

— C. J. Cherryh

38. “You know its shape, since you have it. Give it up, and be paid. Or don’t – and be paid, hani, be paid then too.”

— C. J. Cherryh

39. “It represents a real point of consensus we haven’t got now, and a lot of people were willing to give up things they wanted so they could get that agreement. It was a point in human history where all of Union agreed to a set of priorities, and now we’ll either prove that agreement still binds everybody, or we’ll prove somebody with enough guns can run everything at any given moment; and that means no peace, even for them.”

— C. J. Cherryh

40. “Is that the end,” asked Melein, “of all the races and the civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?”

— C. J. Cherryh

41. “Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But the atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.”

— C. J. Cherryh

42. “He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain – dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.”

— C. J. Cherryh

43. “Were the seeds of next things always there, in the circle of the year, and was that how the world worked its miracles?”

— C. J. Cherryh

44. “It was a monumental achievement that the serpentine tc’a had once upon a time gotten the knnn to understand the concept of trade: so nowadays knnn simply contacted a station, rushed onto its methane-dock and deposited whatever they liked, grabbed whatever they wanted and left. This was an improvement over their former behavior, in which they simply looted and left.”

— C. J. Cherryh

45. “What we individually deserve isn’t as much as what we collectively merit.”

— C. J. Cherryh

46. “The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.”

— C. J. Cherryh

47. “If I can make you angry... I have passed your guard again. I have given you something to think about besides the Game.”

— C. J. Cherryh

48. “Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.”

— C. J. Cherryh

49. “My name’s Elai, Ellai’s daughter, line of the first Cloud, the first Elly; of Pia, line of the first Jin when they made the world. And you’re on my land.”

— C. J. Cherryh

50. “For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.”

— C. J. Cherryh