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

Belief... was its own magic-so long as it was carefully placed, often examined, like a bridge kept in careful repair.

— C.J. Cherryh

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

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....

— C.J. Cherryh

Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much fifth? Could ever there be too much love? And could love to require lies?

— C.J. Cherryh

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 Kneel at its strongest. Perhaps threats simply slid past his attention and he made himself immune.

— C.J. Cherryh

He had read about evil in Elanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never found 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

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

He said sometimes when you're young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything, know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty, and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them. But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most City don't. City have trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real Peter once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets. Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and thinking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong, or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem.

— C.J. Cherryh

He was home, but he wasn't. He had gotten where he had to go, but he hadn't. Furthermore, he had found out who he was, but he didn't know why it had failed to satisfy his questions.

— C.J. Cherryh