“In life, we need to go through a naked tree season in order to turn nothingness into meaning.”

“In fiction, falling in love seemed to happen in soft focus, all cheerful montages of pop music and soulful glances. In reality, it was raw and confronting, powerful and passionate, shifting every goalpost.”

“the fact that you’ll never know what sort of person you might have been if you’d read different stuff”

“Love knows not distance; It hath no continent; It's eyes are for the stars.”

“If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.”

“I’ve heard men complain of doing woman’s work, and women complain of doing man’s work,” she added, fastening her bony thumb and forefinger on Gurgi’s ear and marching him to a stool beside Taran, “but I’ve never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!”

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

“I was used to shooting beer cans off the back of an old washing machine, or at things that ran away from me that I intended to eat—not things that ran toward me with the intent of eating me. I’d found that to be a significant difference.”