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

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

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.

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

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?