A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Via, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.

— Ken Liu

A loyal servant does not think of things outside his control.

— Ken Liu

A momentary smile appeared on Logo's face before fading away. No matter how many times he saw it, he was still amazed by how Zuni's sincerity shaded into an instinct for political theater. He was, of course, moved by the loyalty of a man who would rather be in jail than betray him, but he also knew to play it for all it was worth to cement even more loyalty.

— Ken Liu

As a jailer, I never got to understand my charges. But when I became a bandit, I spent a lot of time being close to the lowliest of the low: criminals, the enslaved, deserters, men who had nothing to lose. Contrary to what I had expected, I found that they had a hardscrabble beauty and grace. They were not mean in their nature, but made mean by the meanness of their rulers. The poor were willing to endure much, but the emperor had taken everything from them.

— Ken Liu

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

— Ken Liu

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neutrons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

— Ken Liu

But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.

— Ken Liu

But in a time of war, knowledge made interesting friendships. Soon, the scholars and the thieves were. . . Well, thick as thieves.

— Ken Liu

But it's not really Chinese, is it?' Logan was thoughtful for a moment. "I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.

— Ken Liu

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.

— Ken Liu