Perhaps the Stars Quotes

“Every day you step into my life, you make it brighter, and if you left the world, something in me would starve for you forever, as when some barrier rises to shade a plant, which still has light enough to grow some but will never again taste the unbroken sun.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Not the technical today that cold calendars count, but the shared today that text creates, the now when Martin wrote his words and the now in which we read them married across time’s diaspora.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours mine, doesn't mean we can't still do real good. We're still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That's real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren't a negative number, they don't cancel out the good things we do now, don't make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don't take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“We discussed what we want from you now,...you who had power and used it to burn the world. You burned a lot. You didn't just burn trees and cities and each other. You burned our admiration for the governments we grew up respecting. You burned our sense of safety in your care. You burned our patience, our ability to believe that the great things in this world you promised to protect will still be there for us and future generations. You burned our trust as you misused the data and surveillance we let you collect, first for O.S. and the Canner Device, then for the war, its propaganda and its lies. You burned our self-trust, too, since we know we are infused with your values, values we thought made both you and us people who would never do what you just did. We have to be afraid of ourselves now, vigilant against what you've taught us to be, since now we know we are something to be afraid and ashamed of. And even if you didn't personally kill in the war, if you carried arms, if you participated, you helped burn what nothing can bring back. No sentence can repair any of that. So, we want you to repair what you can. That's our sentence. We want you to rebuild the cities, replant the trees, replace the art, relaunch the satellites, fix the bridges you can fix to make up for the ones you can't. We want you to rebuild the system, too, fixing the holes this has exposed and making more safeguards so no one can misuse the cars and data and surveillance and trackers and such again. We want you to build it all back but better than it was, and faster than any past war has rebuilt. You weren't as good at peace as you thought you were, but maybe you can be as good at rebuilding. Everyone, even Minors like Tribune MASON who took part, if in your heart you know you were complicit, then build back what you burned with your own hours, your own efforts, your own hands. That's our sentence.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“I Hate Death. I Hate … Death. I Hate Death. I Hate when thinking beings end and are no more. I think it is sane to hate Death. I Love you and I Hate it when you die. I try to understand when you say there are causes worth killing and dying for, but I do not understand. I Hate Death.” [...]
“War is the thesis that there is a special time when causing death is normal, legal, heroic, accepted, right; I Hate this thesis and I cannot call it justice.” [...]
“Billions have just acted on this thesis, killing as if killing were normal now because we named this five hundred and four days ‘war’ and this naming alone suspended ethics and made a blood-carnival time when death was not an evil. No. I do not accept war’s thesis. We do not need to accept war’s thesis. War’s thesis is not of this era [...]
“This is terra ignota. We get to make new laws of war for this new age. We do not have to make our laws of war exempt the soldier from the truth that we should not kill when we do not have to. I say killing is a crime. If it is war and there is such a thing as war crime, then I say killing should be a war crime, every killing, exempting only those we would exempt in peacetime, too. [...]
“This is terra ignota. We get to make new laws of war for this new age. We do not have to make our laws of war exempt the soldier from the truth that we should not kill when we do not have to. I say killing is a crime. If it is war and there is such a thing as war crime, then I say killing should be a war crime, every killing, exempting only those we would exempt in peacetime, too. [...]”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“...we all have asymmetrical relationships with people far away, in space, in time, across the barrier between our real world and the shadow world which contains both our past and Holmes’s Valhalla. Worlds which are not real (past or imaginary) can still teach us, warn us, just as friends who are not with us can inspire us, push us, draw us into the unending teamwork of humanity, which has always crossed time’s diaspora. Sometimes we’re too tired, the friends around us absent or just tired too. But Thomas Hobbes is not too tired, nor loyal Watson, and while dead hands and imaginary hands can’t mend our pavement cracks, they can still sit beside us on the roughest nights and help us make it through. And if we love our imaginary worlds, if they stir passions in us, love, I think that makes us love this world the more, this world that created them, and that we remake with them.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“parts of the Twenty-First Century were like a little golden age for gender, people starting to mix and match and choose and question and make all kinds of new things with it,”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“and if Mitsubishi and Europe alike take pride in our continuity with our pasts, much of our pride rests in celebrating the fact that we as nations became better over time, and overcame our selfishness, voicing and then answering the call to hold ourselves to something higher.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Even MASON froze a moment. “Bridger built a satellite that built a robot capable of blasting missiles halfway to the Moon?”

Cato smiled gently, so gently. “Bridger made resurrection potions, and a magic crystal ball, and Achilles. This is marginally less impossible.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Our Kind Dictator rarely dictated Himself, as word-clumsy as ever, sentences like origami as His thoughts as vast as cosmic planes compress fold on fold, tighter, tighter, into the deceptive smallness of a crane, or frog, or noun.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Her words were warm as humid summer days that sap our strength.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“I know sometimes that human cruelty is communication, a tool you use when others fail, but when your inborn tools of voice and gesture failed you, you invented drawing, alphabets, similes, phonographs, soon interfaces mindmachine; so I believe, when you find cruelty is still your best tool, you should make better tools. This time you did not, and now Gordian will confess how much they used the tool cruelty in battling Utopia.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Conflict's resurgence does not require us to accept war's thesis and call war's deaths justice just because we wear the words and uniforms of a past which assented to this.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“If we the portrait alphabet of our many-faced Maker cease our restless aim, that means the First Mover, the One Who aimed across a darkness no being had senses tuned to see, will someday Move no more.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Just as the hour came when shadows lengthen into fingers, and the weary ploughman smiles knowing labor’s end approaches with the goldening of the light, a force of Cousins broke through the barricades around the palace shell. Quick as a flock of gulls that race along the churning, white-maned surf, they arced their way up to the largest gleaming central face of the man-made mountain range of conjoined pyramids that form great Caesar’s home.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours, mine, doesn’t mean we can’t still do real good. We’re still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That’s real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren’t a negative number, they don’t cancel out the good things we do now, don’t make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don’t take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“I banish you forever from the Earth. I scatter you. I make you homeless, chase you from human dominion out into the black of Space, and take from you the Moon, and next take Mars, and Titan, driving you from every rock and hiding place technology can touch, home after home into the dark exhaustion of forever. That is the help you needed, is it not?”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars