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.

Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don't you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they're programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.

It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

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?

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.