Top 90 Kameron Hurley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your voice is powerful. Your voice has meaning. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t work so hard to try to silence you.”

— Kameron Hurley

2. “Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what’s underneath.”

— Kameron Hurley

3. “Life was what you did with what was done to you.”

— Kameron Hurley

4. “And some of us believe in freedom of the individual over the tyranny of the common good.”

— Kameron Hurley

5. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”

— Kameron Hurley

6. “But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real.”

— Kameron Hurley

7. “We worship the same God and we carry the same sins.”

— Kameron Hurley

8. “War makes monsters of us all. But what happens to those of us who no longer wish to be monsters?”

— Kameron Hurley

9. “Send a monster to kill a monster.”

— Kameron Hurley

10. “We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.”

— Kameron Hurley

11. “When you understand what the world is, you have two choices: Become a part of that world and perpetuate that system forever and ever, unto the next generation. Or fight it, and break it, and build something new. The former is safer, and easier. The latter is scarier, because who is to say what you build will be any better?”

— Kameron Hurley

12. “I love birds. I love to cage them, you see, because when you first do it, they fight so terribly hard. They are so alive, so defiant. I measure how long it takes for them to lose their spirit. To stop fighting. To resign themselves to their fate... They all give up, eventually. They are all in a cage, you see. There is no way out.”

— Kameron Hurley

13. “It’s not meant to comfort,” she says. “It’s truth.”

— Kameron Hurley

14. “Aliens bled red, just like everybody else.”

— Kameron Hurley

15. “It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring – you just had to get up more than you fell down.”

— Kameron Hurley

16. “I remember throwing away a child.”

— Kameron Hurley

17. “I knew that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how good I became, it didn’t guarantee success or recognition. Other people were not going to be better – they were going to get ahead because of who they knew, because of how much money they had, or because they were willing to lie and cheat their way to recognition.”

— Kameron Hurley

18. “It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.”

— Kameron Hurley

19. “We all create the stories we need to survive.”

— Kameron Hurley

20. “All I am, and all I love, is war. I don’t know who I will be if I stop. The world, if it is to survive, needs a leader, not a warmonger. The world I want to make does not require me.”

— Kameron Hurley

21. “What is love anyway but a hunger no meal can satisfy?”

— Kameron Hurley

22. “What if they’d brought some weapon with them, or are launching an assault on the Mokshi right now? How can you or her trust people who are no better than bandits?” I gaze at the human skin stretched over the table. Zan follows my look and quiets. “We are all villains here,” I say.”

— Kameron Hurley

23. “Let’s just put it this way: if you think there’s a thing – anything – women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.”

— Kameron Hurley

24. “All you have to decide, as they say, is what you do with the time given.”

— Kameron Hurley

25. “Your haters are not here for a conversation. They are here to keep you from doing your work.”

— Kameron Hurley

26. “The wonderful thing about being ignorant is that it can be resolved very easily. Foolishness cannot.”

— Kameron Hurley

27. “Power is nothing without discipline. Power without discipline is short lived.”

— Kameron Hurley

28. “She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She’d never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.”

— Kameron Hurley

29. “Let’s be real: if women were “naturally” anything, societies wouldn’t spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives.”

— Kameron Hurley

30. “Human beings are, if nothing else, dedicated to upholding their narrative of the way the world is supposed to be, whether or not that world ever truly existed.”

— Kameron Hurley

31. “You will learn to love it. Or it will destroy you. Neither is unpleasant.”

— Kameron Hurley

32. “And for the first time, I pity her, because when she says love, I think she really means it. For her, this is love. This is what she does to someone she loves. And I wonder if I am any better, because this is what I did to Zan all those rotations ago. I seduced her until she loved me with all her heart, and when it came time to do what needed to be done, I was willing to sacrifice that love, but she was not.”

— Kameron Hurley

33. “We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing.”

— Kameron Hurley

34. “Bodies are only beautiful if they aren’t yours.”

— Kameron Hurley

35. “Reality TV does actually have a message, folks. That message is selling and reinforcing capitalism, ignorance, and the status quo.”

— Kameron Hurley

36. “Most people who watch a fight think it’s all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.”

— Kameron Hurley

37. “The monsters don’t live in the belly of the world like they all say. The monsters live inside of us. We make the monsters.”

— Kameron Hurley

38. “She had a lined, weathered face that put Roh in mind of the creased leather spines of old books.”

— Kameron Hurley

39. “She holds up the map. “It’s all fine! I have the traders’ maps.” She squints at it. “According to this, there are some pits, a mountain range, some monster herds, and a couple tribes of mutants. It will be fine! A fine adventure!”

— Kameron Hurley

40. “All you do is learn how to fight a war,” Nyx said. “Nobody ever teaches you how to stop.”

— Kameron Hurley

41. “Everything hurt. It meant she was alive.”

— Kameron Hurley

42. “Women in Nasheen didn’t grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.”

— Kameron Hurley

43. “This is why I write. This is why I keep speaking. This is why I endure. Because if I don’t tell my stories, someone else will.”

— Kameron Hurley

44. “It’s easy to force affection. Far more difficult to entice it.”

— Kameron Hurley

45. “Lilia did not believe in miracles outside of history books, but she was beginning to believe in her own power, and that was a more frightening thing to believe in.”

— Kameron Hurley

46. “It’s a joke,” Casamir says. “Because of science.”

— Kameron Hurley

47. “You have to strip all that away to see it for what it is: Sexism is about power. Sexism is about controlling the means of production.”

— Kameron Hurley

48. “When we were too frightened to save our own people, we murdered others.”

— Kameron Hurley

49. “Just keep in mind,” Liaro said, “they’re not going to remember the words. They’ll remember how you made them feel. Make them feel something.”

— Kameron Hurley

50. “There is nothing I fear more than someone without memory. A person without memory is free to do anything she likes.”

— Kameron Hurley