If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.

Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.