“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”

“Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.”

“Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.”

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”

“It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.”

“They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings."A Fire Upon the Deep”

“Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.”