Yoon Ha Lee

“There’s no honor,” she said. “Only duty.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“I do my job,” Mikodez said, “because after all the trouble I went to get it, it would be irresponsible not to.”…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“But then, war is about taking the future away from people.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“(Cabbages were a Kel idiosyncrasy. They were adamant about their spiced cabbage pickles.) Appearance-wise”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Some of the soldiers made disparaging comments about the fact that he was a womanform when they thought he couldn’t hear them.…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold,”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“History forgives the winner a lot of things.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“For a traitor, Jedao had always been a judgmental prick.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“sangfroid. Brezan took notes, even though the meeting was being recorded, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on what…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“In some universes, all possible pasts funnel towards a single fixed ending, Ω. It you are of millenarian bent, you might call…

— Yoon Ha Lee

“Orchestrate a battle; orchestrate a piece of music. This isn't the only language that uses the same verb for both.”

— Yoon Ha Lee

“In the dramas people shied from Shuos assassins and saboteurs, but the ones you had to watch out for were the bureaucrats.”

— Yoon Ha Lee