C.J. Cherryh Quotes

Carolyn Janice Cherry

C. J. Cherryh is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award-winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen. (C.J. Cherryh Quotes)

“A bizarre hysteria, perhaps, that point which many reached here, when anger was all that mattered. It led to self-destruction.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“A fine lady she weren’t, oh, but a damn fine woman and a brave one.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding…and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Eagles

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Cyteen

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Foreigner

“Before is the only time you own, the only before you can trust is now, and you don’t even know how long before is.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“Brains and sex fight each other to control your life, and thank God brains get a head start before sex comes along.”
C.J. Cherryh
Cyteen

“But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.”
C.J. Cherryh
Invader

“But it was safety he had found at Uwen’s back, at long last, after long running. Uwen offered him protection, a trusted, a kindly presence, strong enough to chase the shadows for him.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“But once out of Tabini’s immediate presence the spell was broken, the excitement ebbed, and adrenaline was shifting from second-to-second performance to the raw
C.J. Cherryh
Invader

that he had a human situation on his hands and that he’d given atevi far too much information.”
C.J. Cherryh
Invader

“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”
C.J. Cherryh
Lois & Clark

“Change, son of mine, should be applied like salt to a dish—best taste it, understand it, and then decide.”
C.J. Cherryh
Convergence

“Clark. Superman. She loved two men. It was extraordinary how alike and how different they were.-Lois Lane”
C.J. Cherryh
Lois & Clark

“Don’t mourn might-have-beens . Magic can’t work backwards , only forward . I taught you better than that.”
C.J. Cherryh
Rusalka

“Flying was no cure for want of sleep. The brain wanted time to recycle: when it became all one long, uninterrupted day, the ability to keep going and to keep thinking was no warrant it was healty even for Superman.-Superman”
C.J. Cherryh
Lois & Clark

“Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets.”
C.J. Cherryh
Foreigner

“God—had it happened? Was it true?
Had he just lost not only the words, but all the time between?
Or was this the greatest case of test anxiety in history? God.”
C.J. Cherryh
Visitor

“He could be distracted, still, by beauty, by the wonder of a stroke of sunlight. Perhaps at such times he made himself open to wizardry-or conversely, was as warded and safe at such moments as Ynefel at its strongest. Perhaps threats simply slid past his attention and he made himself immune.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Eagles

“He had no wish to be killed by a bogle in which he resolutely did not believe.”
C.J. Cherryh
Rusalka

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Dragons

“He knew that he wielded magic as well as iron, and yet looked away from it, and made himself fables to explain his own presence in the world, and sought gods who might be more powerful than himself. It would be very comfortable if there were someone more powerful than himself, on this Road, on this particular morning, someone to guide him, even someone to blame.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Eagles

“He was home, but he wasn’t. He had gotten where he had to go, but he hadn’t. He had found out who he was, but he didn’t know why it had failed to satisfy his questions.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Ice

“He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain – dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Faded Sun Trilogy

“I would suggest that you remember she is old because some of her enemies are dead.”
C.J. Cherryh
Inheritor

“If I can make you angry… I have passed your guard again. I have given you something to think about besides the Game”
C.J. Cherryh
The Faded Sun Trilogy

“I’m not a person who stands still well. But the the earth is always in motion, and I like keeping up with it. I don’t want just to exist. I want to know. I want to see. I want to understand.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

“Intimidation needs response, bait needs biting. If you do neither, the attacker has nothing to build on.”
C.J. Cherryh
Visitor

“Is that the end,” asked Melein, “of all the races and the civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?”
C.J. Cherryh
The Faded Sun Trilogy

“It is of course, always an age of wonders. The true gift is remembering to look out the windows, and to let the thoughts run backward and forward and wide to the breadth and height of all that’s ever been and might yet be Once upon a time, I tell you.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

“It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years… but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“It’s the being there; the working of it; the feel of moving through what could surprise you at any moment. It’s being a dust speck in that scale and pushing your way through all that Empty on your own terms, that no world can do and nothing spinning around one.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Betrayal

“Murder has been done for far lesser things than thrones. Most dangerous when the possessors of thrones forget how they came by them.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“My name’s Elai, Ellai’s daughter, line of the first Cloud, the first Elly; of Pia, line of the first Jin when they made the world. And you’re on my land.”
C.J. Cherryh
Forty Thousand in Gehenna

“Myself, I love the woods. I love the wild places. Ask me where I’d go for a vacation and it invariably involves the open country. Ask me where I’d live, however, and it would always be in the center, in the beating heart of a city.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

“Not advisable is spread thickly over this entire situation.”
C.J. Cherryh
Deceiver

“Once he had thought it a refuge, once he had thought it holiness…. But now he began to suspect that the good brothers did not shadow the ether not because they were good, but because they had masked themselves from everything, had carefully erased their stray thoughts, had poured out their human longings, emptied themselves of desires and become so transparent as existence that they had not only ceased to be evil, they had ceased to be good. They had ceased to fight the battles of everyday life, and simply weighed nothing. Not a feather. Not a grain. They had given up everything, until they vanished from the scale of all that mattered, having given away themselves long before any power declared the contest.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“People who do something can always make a mistake. So can people who do nothing.”
C.J. Cherryh
Chanur’s Legacy

“Tabini was at least canny enough in the differences between atevi and human to know that, gut level, he might think he understood – but chances were very good that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, and never would, unaided by the paidhi, come up with the right forecast of human behavior because he didn’t come with the right hardwiring. Average people didn’t analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.”
C.J. Cherryh
Invader

“That’s the trouble getting involved in politics, nobody wears a name badge!”
C.J. Cherryh
Chanur’s Legacy

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Forty Thousand in Gehenna

“The world was so beautiful, and there was so much of it: he could gaze forever at the wonder of leaves and not see them all: could inhale the wind and not smell all its scents, hear the sounds of men and horses and not hear all the sounds of the woods, and taste the thousand flavors in stale water and still find it wonderful… because it was not the darkness.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Dragons

“Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“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.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Ice

“There was a certain wisdom in doing little, when one was obliged to act in ignorance.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Eagles

“Trade isn’t about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.”
C.J. Cherryh
Chanur’s Legacy

“Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.”
C.J. Cherryh
Forge of Heaven

“Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But the atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.”
C.J. Cherryh
Foreigner

“Unquestioning believers who thought they questioned everything, unhearing believers who heard nothing that in the least degree questioned the tenets of their sacred quest toward a salvation they predetermined to exist.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“Watch out for a man whose enemies keep disappearing.”
C.J. Cherryh
Deceiver

“We cannot say what we would have been, but we can still say what we will be. We are making up that sentence as we go, and we shall never be through with that statement.”
C.J. Cherryh
Deliberations

“Were the seeds of next things always there, in the circle of the year, and was that how the world worked its miracles?”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Eagles

“What is, is, and that’s what we know. What will be is a fine pursuit, but fraught with too damned many possibilities. Fortune-telling, I tell you, is not what it’s surmised to be.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress of Dragons

“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; no great sympathy on the part of the public nor sustained interest from the media: safe politics for the Company.”
C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station

“What we individually deserve isn’t as much as what we collectively merit.”
C.J. Cherryh
Fortress in the Eye of Time

“When it is necessary to survive, then one cannot be brave anymore.”
C.J. Cherryh
Gate of Ivrel

“Women did such things and went on doing them while the sun died because in all of women’s lives there were so many moments that would kill the mind if one thought about them, which would suck the heart and the life out of one, and engrave lines in the face and put gray in the hair if ever one let one’s mind work; but there was in the rhythm and the fascination of the stitches a loss of thought, a void, a blank, that was only numbers and not even that, because the mind did not need to count, the fingers did, the length of a thread against the finger measured evenly as a ruler could divide it, the slight difference in tension sensed finely as a machine could sense, the exact number of stitches keeping pattern without really the need to count, but something inward and regular as the beat of a heart, as the slow passing of time which could be frozen in such acts, or speeded past.”
C.J. Cherryh
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh