64 Quotes by Ada Palmer

What I have read of war suggests that the most devastating mistakes are often made either in war’s inception, when the front lines take their shapes, or after the surrender. In the latter case, exaltation and vendetta often have clouded victors’ judgments as they laid the architecture of their postwar worlds.

Books, even made-up stories, can’t all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn’t always happy.

Never create a personal enemy. Always keep layers of minions between yourself and someone you destroy, it’s safer that way.

More than sixty years ago we instituted floating citizenship, so children of mixed parents would not be compelled to choose between several equal fatherlands. It was not the end of our countries. Almost everyone still prefers to have a homeland to love and return to, and the legal possibility of life without a homeland does not destroy the bonds of culture, language, and history which make a homeland home.

I told you before how hard I fight to make myself believe in this drifting dream you call the present. Now I lost that fight.

The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.

Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.

A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.

What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.