64 Quotes by Ada Palmer

Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?

Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning.

I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.

Color-coded rank hats? Those are worse than wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest! If you want your commanders to survive a week, you want no difference in uniform visible from more than a few meters away. Marking them out like this is madness!

If history is written by winners, fiction like that is written by bystanders trying to guess what the victims would have said if they’d survived.

Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.

Imagine, reader, in primordial days some vicious dinosaur, heavy with nightmare jaws, which chases a shimmering lizard up a slope, and the predator rejoices, already tasting the kill in its blood-starved mind, when, all at once, its slim prey spreads its feathered fins and takes to the air in a world that had not yet realized life could fly. You.

Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.

I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.