Top 90 Erika Johansen Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

10. “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

11. “I put my trust in fiction.”

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

15. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

26. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

28. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.”

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

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

— Erika Johansen

43. “The future cannot be divorced from the past.”

— Erika Johansen

44. “And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse.”

— Erika Johansen

45. “Carlin always said that most men were dogs, and Kelsea had never taken her seriously; there were too many good books written by men.”

— Erika Johansen

46. “I don’t want to die, Arlen, but I would lay down my life for any of these men, or they for me. That’s a real thing, sacrifice, but you will never understand it.”

— Erika Johansen

47. “And for all the anguish that Kelsea’s own reflection had caused her lately, she saw now that there was something far worse than being ugly: being ugly and thinking you were beautiful.”

— Erika Johansen

48. “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

49. “This, I think, is the crux of evil in this world, Majesty: those who feel entitled to whatever they want, whatever they can grab. Such people never ask themselves if they have the right. They consider no cost to anyone but themselves.”

— Erika Johansen

50. “This is how women are trained to stay indoors, she thought, the idea echoing in her mind like a gravesong. This is how women are trained not to act.”

— Erika Johansen