Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.
You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours – they are in your care, and you must be faithful.
All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.
You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run – and always faster than you think.
I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
Monsters almost always are culture’s way of working out their fears.
After love, no one is what they were before.
I’m not lost, because I haven’t any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I’d like to get lost, because then I’d know where I was going, you see.
I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.
He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.
There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.
It’s Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.