C. J. Cherryh Quotes

You are not to tell my parents,” he said, with his arm over his eyes, “but I drank a little brandy from a glass someone left and I am not feeling well this morning. One does not think it was poisoned.

Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.

The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.

Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much fiath?

Could ever there be too much love?

And could love require lies?

And I still like you, damn you. You don’t shake one of us, you don’t fling our liking away because your man'chi says otherwise, you can’t get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you’re stuck with me, so make the best of it.”
There wasn’t a clear translation for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.
[…]
Breath failed him. Self-control did. He flung it all out. “Banichi, I’d walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I’d give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I’d carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?”
[…]“That would be very difficult for you.”
“So is liking atevi.” That got out before he censored it. […]
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not joking. God, I’m not joking. We have to like somebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banich, we outright die. Like, like, like–get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, just once, to know what I think?

The t'ca [ship] left them, rolled and slewed off in a maneuver that made sense to a multi-brained snake.

He’s my enemy. And I need one. I need a good, strong enemy to gather up the people who wish I didn’t exist,

Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.

Clark. Superman. She loved two men. It was extraordinary how alike and how different they were.-Lois Lane

He had read about evil in Efanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad...but none without self-interest, none he could not understand even in terms of his own will to have his way.

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.

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.

What happened this far remote would have little political impact on Earth. What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about. Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues; no pictures, no news; no news, no event.

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....

Atevi could laugh at it. Humans could. Humor at the most outrageous hate-mongering did everyone good, and poked holes in assumptions that otherwise would lie unventilated.