Top 90 Erika Johansen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You think of beauty only as a blessing, Majesty, but it brings its own punishments.”

— Erika Johansen

2. “Fortune favors the bold, history tells us. Therefore, it behooves us to be as bold as possible.”

— Erika Johansen

3. “Selfishness and self-destruction, riding hand in hand, as they so often did.”

— Erika Johansen

4. “Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people.”

— Erika Johansen

5. “Corruption begins with a single moment of weakness.”

— Erika Johansen

6. “The mistake of utopia is to assume that all will be perfect. Perfection may be the definition, but we are human, and even into uopia we bring our own pain, error, jealousy, grief. We cannot relinquish out faults, even in the hope of Paradise, so to plan a new society without taking human nature into account is to doom that society to failure.”

— Erika Johansen

7. “I am Death. I come quickly, I come slowly, but I am not cheated.”

— Erika Johansen

8. “The wrongs of the past are not less significant, they’re just harder to fix. And the longer you ignore them in favor of more pressing issues, the worse the harm, until the problems of the past actually create the problems of the future.”

— Erika Johansen

9. “Anger was the indulgence of a child, not a queen.”

— Erika Johansen

10. “Even small gestures of kindness have the potential to reap enormous rewards. Only the shortsighted man believes otherwise.”

— Erika Johansen

11. “Kelsea saw now that there was something far worse than being ugly: being ugly and thinking you were beautiful.”

— Erika Johansen

12. “There’s a better world out there, so close we can almost touch it.”

— Erika Johansen

13. “There was no quick and easy eradication of evil. There was only the passage of time, of generations, of people raising children who would hold all other lives just as valuable as their own.”

— Erika Johansen

14. “You are special, everyone is special. But you are not better. All are valuable.”

— Erika Johansen

15. “You think I don’t care about my people, but I do... – The Red Queen.”

— Erika Johansen

16. “Such a statement would be blasphemous, Majesty,” the Holy Father replied, his tone gently reproving. “No man can speak for God.”

— Erika Johansen

17. “Entire countries would close their borders and build walls to keep out phantom threats. Can you imagine?”

— Erika Johansen

18. “Memory cut infinitely deeper than swords;.”

— Erika Johansen

19. “Time stretched years back and years forward, but nothing that came afterward ever had the power to wash away what came before.”

— Erika Johansen

20. “I missed you, Lazarus. More than I missed the sunlight, even.”

— Erika Johansen

21. “I know all about the wildness of youth, believe me. But regret has a terrible ability to follow you, long after youth has vanished.”

— Erika Johansen

22. “They had fought and starved and even died in pursuit of mankind’s oldest dream, but they hadn’t known that Tear’s vision was flawed. Too easy. Utopia was not the clean slate Tear had imagined, but an evolution. Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It would take generations, countless generations perhaps, but –.”

— Erika Johansen

23. “Her old appearance had been genuine, and had gained her nothing. But her new appearance was worse, hollow and false, and anything that she gained by it would carry that falsity like a disease.”

— Erika Johansen

24. “An upset stomach was a small price to pay for fiction made real.”

— Erika Johansen

25. “She was unable to keep silent, even when silence would save her trouble or pain.”

— Erika Johansen

26. “Once in a while, usually when Ewen wasn’t even trying, he would solve a mystery, and that was a great and extraordinary feeling, the way he imagined birds would feel as they swooped across the sky.”

— Erika Johansen

27. “I put my trust in fiction.”

— Erika Johansen

28. “Only a fool blames the dealer.”

— Erika Johansen

29. “Pain only disables the weak.”

— Erika Johansen

30. “They had found the seven volumes of Rowling with no help at all, but there was no squabbling.”

— Erika Johansen

31. “Everyone dies eventually. I think it’s better to die clean.”

— Erika Johansen

32. “When it fails, they do call it madness, Lazarus. But when it succeeds, they call it genius.”

— Erika Johansen

33. “Majesty. The word seemed to ripple through her. “I haven’t been crowned, Lazarus.” “No matter, Lady. I see the queenship in you, and I never saw it in your mother, not one day of her life.”

— Erika Johansen

34. “It’s a real thing, glory. But it pales in comparison to what we sacrifice for it.”

— Erika Johansen

35. “Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It.”

— Erika Johansen

36. “When was the last time he’d actually opened those curtains? Years, it had to be years. Sunlight washed the room, turning it white instead of grey, revealing cracks that had never been repaired; wine and food stains on the carpets; even a jack of diamonds that lay alone in the corner, like a raft set adrift on God’s Ocean.”

— Erika Johansen

37. “We don’t always choose, Majesty. We simply make the best choices we can once the deed is done.”

— Erika Johansen

38. “I see this land flowing with books, Father. Widespread literacy.”

— Erika Johansen

39. “I am the Queen of the Tearling! Open the cages! – Kelsea.”

— Erika Johansen

40. “They’re good, these stories,” Mace continued, his cheeks stained with light color. “They teach the pain of others.” “Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers.”

— Erika Johansen

41. “She looked at the land around her, the deep amber of the wheat cut by the yellow line of the road, and wished that she could make it a softer world.”

— Erika Johansen

42. “Those who cease to worry about their souls often find them difficult to reclaim later.”

— Erika Johansen

43. “The Fetch was intelligent, diabolically so, and intelligent people devised intelligent cruelties. That was where the Red Queen had always excelled.”

— Erika Johansen

44. “But even if safety were somehow achievable by force, Lear, ask yourself this: how important is safety? Is it worth steadily undermining every principle on which a free nation was founded? What sort of nation will you have then?”

— Erika Johansen

45. “The Fetch had belonged to God’s Church long enough to know that the carnage before him was nothing to do with God, or good. Brutality found such great camouflage under the cross.”

— Erika Johansen

46. “Weakness, all the more dangerous for being combined with a sense of entitlement.”

— Erika Johansen

47. “Learn all the knowledge in the world, but your gut will always know best.”

— Erika Johansen

48. “The hawk ripped out his jugular, spraying the morning sunlight with a fine mist of blood.”

— Erika Johansen

49. “He doesn’t need to be perfect, she decided suddenly. The idea is perfect, and the idea is bigger than the man.”

— Erika Johansen

50. “Whenever she had a problem to consider, she invariably found herself in the library, for it was easier to think when she was surrounded by books.”

— Erika Johansen