Top 40 Joan He Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Logic ended where love began.”

— Joan He

2. “Knowledge is truth, Little Bird. Those who refuse to learn live in a world of falsity.”

— Joan He

3. “And I think we have even less choice over the ones we’re meant to find.”

— Joan He

4. “None of us live without consequence. Our personal preferences are not truly personal. One person’s needs will deny another’s. Our privileges can harm ourselves and others.”

— Joan He

5. “People wanted the quickest, easiest solutions. To solve their most immediate problems, they could steal from any future other than their own.”

— Joan He

6. “In the times ahead, you may not know whom to trust. So trust in yourself, and trust in your beliefs.”

— Joan He

7. “Memories are short. History plays out in cycles. Tables turn; the sufferers rise and make their oppressors suffer. This is simply human nature.”

— Joan He

8. “Anger is a form of confidence – a hope that the ones we admire will change for the better.”

— Joan He

9. “What is truth? Scholars seek it. Poets write it. Good Kings pay gold to hear it. But in trying times, truth is the first thing we betray.”

— Joan He

10. “The problem with oceans? They always seem smaller from the shore.”

— Joan He

11. “You can’t possibly touch all the lives in this world. But if you can lift someone with your two hands, that is enough.”

— Joan He

12. “Missing some people was like missing air. You did yourself no favors by wondering how you survived without them.”

— Joan He

13. “Her, against a seasoned court. Her, against the tides of war. Her, against the king’s assassin.”

— Joan He

14. “Alone is an island. It’s an uncrossable sea, being too far from another soul, whereas lonely is being too close, in the same house yet separated by walls because we choose to be, and when I fall asleep, the pain of loneliness follows me as I dream of more walls.”

— Joan He

15. “It should have healed without a scar. But no queen had time to apply tiger balm twice a day, and a bumpy seam of new skin gleamed under the lantern light.”

— Joan He

16. “When I dream of her, it’s in vibrant color, unlike the gradients of gray of my monochrome days. But everything is hazy when I wake. The details merge. The colors fade.”

— Joan He

17. “People are more predictable than they care to admit.”

— Joan He

18. “The ocean does not come poisoned. People poison it.”

— Joan He

19. “Her father had gifted her this pin as he’d gifted his love: from the moment of her birth, when her hands had been too small to grasp its form.”

— Joan He

20. “The only place Kasey still found Celia was in her dreams.”

— Joan He

21. “With a twist of unease, Hesina sank against the pillows at her back. “It was never fine. The Eleven freed the oppressed by oppressing their oppressors.”

— Joan He

22. “You don’t owe the people some better version of yourself. In fact, you owe this world nothing.”

— Joan He

23. “Equality is not the natural way of the world, whispered her father’s voice. It must be nurtured.”

— Joan He

24. “Because it was possible to love someone without fully understanding them. Possible to love parts of them, and not their whole.”

— Joan He

25. “To learn, her mind had needed to unlearn.”

— Joan He

26. “No one enters this world by choice. If we’re lucky, we can choose how we leave.”

— Joan He

27. “The dominos had been set centuries ago. One quake, and they all fell.”

— Joan He

28. “She wasn’t good at much. A long, long time ago, she thought she had a knack for acting. She took to lying, and she preferred living in someone else’s skin as opposed to her own. But nothing squelched childish dreams quite like inheriting the throne. Learning to rule was an all-consuming pastime.”

— Joan He

29. “If you want to understand a person, peer at his heart through the window of his prejudices and assumptions.”

— Joan He

30. “This fate had chosen her. It was only now, seventeen years later, that she chose it back.”

— Joan He

31. “Everyone lived at the expense of someone else.”

— Joan He

32. “We are as real as we believe ourselves to be.”

— Joan He

33. “No night was perfect for treason, but this one came close.”

— Joan He

34. “But tonight, Hesina let herself miss her father. She missed him. She missed him a lot. As the distant chords flowed into their little clearing, winding with the strings of her heart, she imagined herself riding on a chariot to face the Kendi’an Crown Prince. And later, when she slept, she dreamed she died, but her father read her back to life, and together they flew to the lunar palace on the backs of their giant cranes.”

— Joan He

35. “She didn’t mind that he blamed her, or that they only knew how to make each other whole when they were broken. For once, she didn’t want anything more than just to hold him.”

— Joan He

36. “Even in a sea, every life rippled far beyond its end.”

— Joan He

37. “Passage 3.4.2: ‘Justice is a muscle. Without faith it weakens. Without use, it decays. Without challenges it does not strengthen.”

— Joan He

38. “War isn’t easy, Cloud. Our means cannot be as honorable as our cause.”

— Joan He

39. “So breathe. And again. And again, until you forget you are deliberately breathing. Search until you forget you are deliberately searching.”

— Joan He

40. “There were no simple questions, or simple answers, Hesina decided bitterly. There were only truths sacrificed for other truths.”

— Joan He

41. “Others might believe there’s power in a single step,” murmured Actinium, the cadence of his breath brushing Kasey’s ear. Her eyes widened. His warmth was real. So was the brace of his arm. The press of his chest. “But most choices are made before you reach the edge.”

— Joan He

42. “Thud. Her father was immortal. Thud. The face she’d known all her life was a lie, aged forward by a sooth. Thud. How? Thud. How? Thud. Thud. Thud.”

— Joan He

43. “Home could be here, for all I care, if she were with me.”

— Joan He

44. “Most choices are made before you reach the edge.”

— Joan He