C. J. Cherryh Quotes

Yes, aiji-ma.” “What is this agreement? You are most valuable when you argue, paidhi! Do not say yes to me!” “I shall most strenuously object when you are wrong, aiji-ma. You have been infallibly right at least this last hour.” “Ha.

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

Trade isn't about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.

Not advisable is spread thickly over this entire situation.

There is your best path, if you can get on it and direct it as best you can. The direction it may take yet is not in your power: but what sort of man walks that path, when you are a man, that you can decide.

If your fiancé tended to come sailing in windows without notice, you didn’t have extra time to run and gather up messes. She dropped everything into the hamper and stepped into a hot, steamy shower, soap with no cloying scent, just clean. Just her again. And her eyes shut while she was standing there. She’d slip down the shower wall and go to sleep there, but she was already getting stiff. She got out, delved into the medicine cabinet for a couple of Advil and chased them down with a glass of water. Clean, clear water. A miracle. She stood watching crystal liquid swirl down the drain and thought somehow she’d never asked herself how water got that clean. She splashed it up in her face, dried her Band-Aids with a towel And went and turned on her computer. Last thing. Last defining thing – on any day.-Lois Lane

What you need Lois, is a man. All your artistic brilliance, wasted, toiling away in the sordid day-to-day of White’s little paper empire. Reporting on traffic mishaps. Domestic trifles. Wondering if you can afford a pair of shoes. Knowing you can’t afford the really good wines, the really exquisite things. That suit, for instance. Nice, but not the standard you’re used to.” “We’re not here to discuss my wardrobe.” “Or your writing career? How much have you gotten done, I mean, really done Lois?” “Still looking for an evening you aren’t exhausted? When will that be, Lois?” “The hotel. Or I’m out of here.” – Lois Lane & Lex Luthor

"Poisoning us," Bren said, faced with what was a truly attractive service, and with the servants still in the room, "is a process of inconveniently many steps, though conservative of the furniture. One believes we may just have breakfast this morning, nadiin-ji."

Baji-naji, nand' paidhi. Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets.

And she learned to do that, be very nice to people she knew quite well were the Enemy, and even like them sometimes: it didn't mean you weren't going to Get them, because they were bound to do something that would remind you what they were sooner or later.

One tribe moves out and one tribe stays. History broadens, and philosophy shifts, develops a rift, splits one population from the other . . . and a schism happens, minor or major. It’s the way humankind has always proliferated. We go over the next hill, live a few hundred years, change our languages to accommodate things we never saw before — and before we know it, our cousins think we have an accent. Or we think they have a strange attitude. And we don’t really understand our cousins any longer.

But there was someone she knew who could speak with a special knowledge on the Cross-Lexcorp controversy. Someone she’d rather not deal with. Someone she’d as soon not see again as long as she lived. Her former fiancé. Lex. Lex Luthor. – Lois Lane

But, oh, how precious those things were! To look at the sky, breathe the cold wind, have fingers nipped by chill and skin stung red and heart stirred to life, gods, he had been dead until Tristen arrived and asked him the first vexing question, and posed him the first insoluble puzzle, and marveled at hailstones and mourned over falling leaves. What miracles there were all around....

Also, a foreign accent if at least intelligible can sound quite sexy.

You know its shape, since you have it. Give it up, and be paid. Or don’t — and be paid, hani, be paid then too.