Top 100 N.k. Jemisin Quotes
#1. (It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.) Lately
N.K. Jemisin
#2. That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealous, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.
N.K. Jemisin
#4. Embrace love while you have it, priest - from whichever direction it comes, proper or improper, for however long it lasts. Because it always, always comes to an end.
N.K. Jemisin
#5. Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.
N.K. Jemisin
#7. The Nightlord cannot be controlled, child. He can only be unleashed. And you asked him not to kill.
N.K. Jemisin
#8. Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.
N.K. Jemisin
#9. You've read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.
N.K. Jemisin
#10. It is important to give just the right instructions. He thinks in loopholes.
N.K. Jemisin
#11. Only learning oneself better, and understanding one's place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.
N.K. Jemisin
#12. When things are bad, change is good, right? Change means things will get better.
N.K. Jemisin
#13. We can never be gods, after all
but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
N.K. Jemisin
#14. Eyes whose color I would never be able to fully describe, even if I someday learn the words. The best I can do is compare it to things I do know: the heavy thickness of red gold, the smell of brass on a hot day, desire and pride.
N.K. Jemisin
#15. Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.
N.K. Jemisin
#16. Wounds get better. What makes grief get better?" "Nothing. Time can ease it, but nothing ends it.
N.K. Jemisin
#17. The Cloud Roads has wildly original worldbuilding, diverse and engaging characters, and a thrilling adventure plot. It's that rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn't go where ten thousand others have gone before. I can't wait for my next chance to visit the Three Worlds!
N.K. Jemisin
#18. But Schaffa is a grown-up, and grown-ups need their sleep; that's what her father always said whenever she or Chaga did something that woke him up.
N.K. Jemisin
#19. Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended.
N.K. Jemisin
#20. The way I see it, a stranger feels like a stranger; a friend feels like a friend. Simple.
N.K. Jemisin
#21. Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.
N.K. Jemisin
#22. Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps.
N.K. Jemisin
#23. True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.
N.K. Jemisin
#24. It's a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to
N.K. Jemisin
#25. The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it's all the same thing.
N.K. Jemisin
#27. Listen, listen, listen well. There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.)
N.K. Jemisin
#28. But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.
N.K. Jemisin
#29. Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Stop this. It's undignified.
N.K. Jemisin
#30. Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.
N.K. Jemisin
#31. You've never really trusted him, though you don't understand why. Something about the fact that he's hidden all his life - which is hypocritical as hell after your ten years in Tirimo.
N.K. Jemisin
#32. I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.
N.K. Jemisin
#33. Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
N.K. Jemisin
#34. It's not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It's that you haven't yet proven yourself.
(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)
N.K. Jemisin
#35. It was said that the gods favored fools because they were entertaining to watch.
N.K. Jemisin
#36. Whether you live or die is irrelevant. You are Arameri, and like all of us, you will serve.
N.K. Jemisin
#37. Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness.
N.K. Jemisin
#38. As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.
N.K. Jemisin
#39. Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin, myrrh, lapis, and jungissa. Four bands of color mark the face of the Dreaming Moon. Red for blood. White for seed. Yellow for ichor. Black for bile.
N.K. Jemisin
#40. It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.
N.K. Jemisin
#41. keep the magma down, at least until it finds another, slower way to wend its way to the surface.
N.K. Jemisin
#42. Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
N.K. Jemisin
#43. They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.
N.K. Jemisin
#44. Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.
N.K. Jemisin
#45. And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal.
That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.
N.K. Jemisin
#46. So there was love, once. More than love. And now there is more than hate. Mortals have no words for what we gods feel. Gods have no words for such things. But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always love left, underneath. Horrible, isn't it?
N.K. Jemisin
#47. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.
N.K. Jemisin
#48. With epic fantasy, there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack.
N.K. Jemisin
#49. It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small - a locked room-style story.
N.K. Jemisin
#50. When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.
N.K. Jemisin
#52. You're very lucky ... Friends are precious, powerful things - hard to earn, harder still to keep. You should thank this one for taking a chance on you.
N.K. Jemisin
#53. Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son's birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father's hatred.
N.K. Jemisin
#54. The shadows of Ina-Karekh are the place where nightmares dwell, but not their source. Never forget: the shadowlands are not elsewhere. We create them. They are within.
N.K. Jemisin
#55. The opposite of liking is not disliking, after all. The opposite of liking is apathy.
N.K. Jemisin
#56. But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.
N.K. Jemisin
#57. Any woman can face the world alone, but why should we have to?
N.K. Jemisin
#58. You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.
N.K. Jemisin
#59. It's the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode.
N.K. Jemisin
#60. Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted?
N.K. Jemisin
#61. I would savor every moment of my life that remained, suck its marrow, crunch its bones. And when the end came ... well, I would not be alone. That was a precious and holy thing.
N.K. Jemisin
#62. It is important to appreciate beauty, even when it is evil.
N.K. Jemisin
#63. This is magic we're talking about. It's supposed to go places science can't, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.
N.K. Jemisin
#64. This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
N.K. Jemisin
#65. There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.
N.K. Jemisin
#66. You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.
N.K. Jemisin
#67. Magic is the mysteries into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it's coolest when it doesn't.
N.K. Jemisin
#68. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it.
N.K. Jemisin
#69. For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.
N.K. Jemisin
#70. But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying. Something
N.K. Jemisin
#71. Inevitable is not the same as immediate, Sieh
and love does not mandate forgiveness.
N.K. Jemisin
#72. Men who served anyone could be trusted by no one.
N.K. Jemisin
#73. And when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.
N.K. Jemisin
#74. Sieh was a horrible father and a wretched friend and a barely competent employee, completely unworthy of being missed or mourned.
N.K. Jemisin
#75. There is no greater warrior than a mother protecting her child.
N.K. Jemisin
#76. Immortality gets very, very boring. You'd be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.
N.K. Jemisin
#77. There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.
N.K. Jemisin
#78. Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur.
N.K. Jemisin
#79. The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.
N.K. Jemisin
#81. There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.
N.K. Jemisin
#82. It's not hate that you're seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren't a person, just like that.
N.K. Jemisin
#83. It's a gift if it makes us better. It's a curse if we let it destroy us.
N.K. Jemisin
#84. You are insignifiant. One of millions, neither special nor unique. I did not ask for this ignominy, and I resent the comparison.
Fine. I don't like you, either.
N.K. Jemisin
#85. Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality.
N.K. Jemisin
#86. Think you hate me because ... I'm someone you can hate. I'm here, I'm handy. But what you really hate is the world.
N.K. Jemisin
#87. Evil was the most contagious of diseases, so virulent that no herb, surgery, or dream-humor could cure it. One's sense of what was normal, acceptable, became distorted by proximity to wrongness; entire nations had succumbed this way, first to decadence, then collapse.
N.K. Jemisin
#88. It doesn't mean anything to him, she can see by his now-furious glare. He inhales to start shouting, she has no idea what but she doesn't want to hear it, and before he can she snaps, "I'm here to fuck you, Earth burn it. Is that worth disturbing your beauty rest?
N.K. Jemisin
#89. Denying what you are didn't keep people from knowing what you are."
"And flaunting it isn't what saved you."
Ykka takes a deep breath. The muscles in her jaw flex, relax. "And that would be why I asked you do this, Cutter. But let's move on."
So it goes on.
N.K. Jemisin
#90. I considered several lies - then decided the truth was so outrageous that she might believe it more readily. I'm a godling, sent by an organization of godlings based in Shadow. We think you might be trying to destroy the world. Could you, perhaps, stop?
N.K. Jemisin
#91. Grief sounds like a bad thing," I said, frowning. "Why don't you and Naha and Mama get rid of it?" "That would require removing love from existence.
N.K. Jemisin
#92. How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.
N.K. Jemisin
#94. In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
N.K. Jemisin
#95. Everyone _shouldn't_ have a say in whose life is worth fighting for.
N.K. Jemisin
#96. You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?
N.K. Jemisin
#97. The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.
N.K. Jemisin
#98. Because I think I saw you, yesterday morning when I woke up. I think my eyes worked again, just for a moment, and you were the light I saw.
N.K. Jemisin
#99. Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.
N.K. Jemisin
#100. After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being.
N.K. Jemisin
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