Top 70 Yoon Ha Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

2. “Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

3. “It still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

4. “The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

5. “A cat wriggled in Zehun’s arms: the orange tabby Jienji, who, like all of Zehun’s cats, was named after a notorious Shuos assassin. Even someone who liked cats as much as Zehun did was unlikely to run out of names anytime soon.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

6. “I wish I could stop caring. And the day after that, scrawled in the margin in jagged, shaky letters almost entirely unlike his usual handwriting: I know how to do that.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

7. “Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

8. “Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

9. “The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

10. “I do my job,” Mikodez said, “because after all the trouble I went to get it, it would be irresponsible not to.” He.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

11. “According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

12. “There are too many shapes of love to be counted. One of them is forgiveness.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

13. “There had always been the rumour that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

14. “It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth. What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts. Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

15. “It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

16. “Orchestrate a battle; orchestrate a piece of music. This isn’t the only language that uses the same verb for both.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

17. “The silence could have swallowed a star.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

18. “I don’t know how to live.” “But you do,” she said. “It’s all about the distinguishing moments. It’s about going from one to the next, no matter how small the interval of time, or how long.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

19. “The knife was sharp in the way of bitter nights.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

20. “Feet scraped inside-out next to unblemished boots. Black-and-gold Kel uniforms braided into cracked rib cages. Gape-jawed, twisted skulls with eye sockets staring out their sides and strands of tendon knotted through crumbling teeth. A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

21. “After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

22. “She didn’t need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

23. “Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

24. “Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?”

— Yoon Ha Lee

25. “The first rule of any game was to assume you could win, even if you had to hunt through the universe’s cracks for a strategy, even if you had to turn the pieces inside-out, even if you had to tell so many lies to the opponent that they couldn’t figure out which way was up.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

26. “We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

27. “She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

28. “You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

29. “This time they’re making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

30. “He knelt to pet the friendlier of Zehun’s two cats, Fenez. The other one was hiding, as usual. Fenez still bore a scary resemblance to a knitting project gone horribly awry.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

31. “In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity’s far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

32. “A Lanterner’s life had worth the way a heptarchate soldier’s life had worth. A life was a life. It was a simple equation.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

33. “In mathematics you had peer review, definite proofs and answers, but war was nothing but uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

34. “The archtraitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

35. “We’re fighting people whose only interest in Kel rules of engagement is to tie us in knots with them. They’re going to cheat. Which means we have to cheat better.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

36. “In Inesser’s experience, being distracted by shooting pains in your ass never improved your decision-making ability.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

37. “Taking away people’s names denied their power, a lesson Cheris tried not to think about.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

38. “Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father’s house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won’t find in any astronomer’s catalogue.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

39. “It would be a shame to let all that hostile intent go to waste.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

40. “Some of the soldiers made disparaging comments about the fact that he was a womanform when they thought he couldn’t hear them. But his fellow officers were civil about it, which was all he cared about.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

41. “One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

42. “Even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

43. “The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

44. “For a traitor, Jedao had always been a judgmental prick.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

45. “I have loved you in your own language, Kaela thought as she picked up her blades, so softly that we never knew it. Let your language be mine; let me cast my own shadows.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

46. “But that didn’t mean those things weren’t worth doing. Someone had to carry on with the small acts that kept civilization moving. And this time it was her turn.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

47. “He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

48. “History forgives the winner a lot of things.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

49. “Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

50. “Remember that despite the fact that I’m a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn’t me.”

— Yoon Ha Lee