Top 90 Kameron Hurley Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “And there is good money to be made when things are bad.”

— Kameron Hurley

52. “Light doesn’t always keep the dark things away,” Nyx said.”

— Kameron Hurley

53. “So long as the people with the power – to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket – look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia or any other -sim they’ve learned form stories, videos, media and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone.”

— Kameron Hurley

54. “There is something more than violence that Nasheenians taught me, and that is the awful brutality of speaking absolute truth. I propose that we begin to unmask ourselves. We speak the truth of ourselves. We tell them just how many of us there are.”

— Kameron Hurley

55. “The secret to leadership is not to be a particularly intelligent person. It is to surround oneself with those far smarter than oneself. And try not to kill them.”

— Kameron Hurley

56. “It all came apart once you started caring for something outside yourself.”

— Kameron Hurley

57. “Someone had to fight the monsters. Who better than a monster?”

— Kameron Hurley

58. “Nyx had to admit she had a soft spot for plain folks. There was something to be said for finding beauty in the rough.”

— Kameron Hurley

59. “She wanted to build a better world. So why did so many others want to keep it just the same?”

— Kameron Hurley

60. “It wasn’t what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you.”

— Kameron Hurley

61. “Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her own life. Things hadn’t turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she could just be the hero of someone else’s life, but there was no one who cared enough about her to keep her that close. Hell, there was nobody she’d let that close. No one wanted a hero who couldn’t even save herself.”

— Kameron Hurley

62. “Don’t just fight the darkness, friends. Let’s be the light.”

— Kameron Hurley

63. “Every time Nyx thought she’d gotten out of the business of killing boys, she shot another one.”

— Kameron Hurley

64. “Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.”

— Kameron Hurley

65. “Nyx did what she always did after she shot a terrorist or garrotted a deserter. She carried on.”

— Kameron Hurley

66. “Why is it all hot pants and back tattoos? Why the symbols of toughness instead of actual dark alley terror? Why do we celebrate “girl power” but sneer at “women power”?”

— Kameron Hurley

67. “Most days, though, she was just Taigan – all sexes and none. It amused her to play with the language of self.”

— Kameron Hurley

68. “Nobody really knows what I am,” Nyx said. “Not until I put a bullet in their head.”

— Kameron Hurley

69. “They’d pay attention to me less. They’d judge me by gender, by looks, by weight before anything else. I automatically started every interaction at a disadvantage.”

— Kameron Hurley

70. “That meant the only reliable way was... through.”

— Kameron Hurley

71. “Her body sometimes amazed her. She could keep going long after she couldn’t.”

— Kameron Hurley

72. “Storytelling instead of info dumping is a fairly well-known life hack, but there are still very few people who tell stories instead of facts.”

— Kameron Hurley

73. “When Lilia was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lilia’s blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence.”

— Kameron Hurley

74. “His militia escorted her up four painful flights of stairs to a great foyer, apologizing the whole way for not considering how difficult stairs would be for her. What they really meant, of course, was that they felt silly and impatient because her pace was so much slower than theirs.”

— Kameron Hurley

75. “She is equal parts manic brutality and strategic fuckery.”

— Kameron Hurley

76. “What were all of them, really, but bits of something else? Bits of stars?”

— Kameron Hurley

77. “I have spent my life battling monsters. It was only in realizing that I was the monster, and choosing to destroy her, that I could save the world.”

— Kameron Hurley

78. “At the end of the world, the war was going to come down to throwing stones.”

— Kameron Hurley

79. “Becoming a thing, isn’t it? Killing ourselves.”

— Kameron Hurley

80. “If it wasn’t the Tai Mora, who would we fight? Ourselves? The Dhai? The Dorinah? Always another face, always the same face.”

— Kameron Hurley

81. “You started caring about somebody, you did stupid things.”

— Kameron Hurley

82. “Imagine us all standing in a circle, trying to describe an object to one another, and as we agree on its characteristics, the thing at the center of our circle begins to take form. That’s how we create reality. We agree on its rules. Its shape.”

— Kameron Hurley

83. “Smile all the brighter for being the villain.”

— Kameron Hurley

84. “It’s funny, how sometimes you run so hard away from something that you find yourself exactly where you started.”

— Kameron Hurley

85. “It takes a while to really get that it could happen to you. You’re the hero of your own story. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends.”

— Kameron Hurley

86. “I: You’re a communist then. S: Let’s say I’m old enough not to be dazzled by Ayn Rand.”

— Kameron Hurley

87. “I listen when people think I don’t. That’s the secret to staying alive. You must know more than you pretend.”

— Kameron Hurley

88. “We keep thinking history happened to someone else, but history is where we came from; what happened before us is how we got to where we are.”

— Kameron Hurley

89. “Did you know those who are mildly depressed see the world more accurately? Yet they don’t live as long as optimists. Aren’t as successful. It turns out that being able to perceive actual reality has very little long-term benefit.”

— Kameron Hurley

90. “What if there’s nowhere else to go? What if there’s only the Legion?” “The stars are legion,” I say. “Look at them. All those other suns. There could be many other worlds like ours circling them. Maybe worlds very different from ours. We can learn from them.”

— Kameron Hurley

91. “This is the power and promise of science fiction, this magic of creating and living in every possible future.”

— Kameron Hurley

92. “What are we risking by speaking up? Everything, certainly. But the far riskier business is not speaking up at all.”

— Kameron Hurley

93. “But I find soldiering false, a broken way to manage people who should be bound to you in love, not fear.”

— Kameron Hurley

94. “I found that it isn’t the memories that made us; it is what we decided to do with them.”

— Kameron Hurley

95. “I don’t know why desire has to be so complicated. I know what I need and what I want, and there is a place where those two things intersect, but it is a dangerous place. I want it nonetheless.”

— Kameron Hurley

96. “The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change. The power of the corrupt governments and entrenched corporations feels inevitable. No doubt so did the rule of the kings and landowners before them. But I know better now. I know there is a greater power, and it is ours. The greater power is us. And that is the world we will build out here, somewhere, when we bring all our pieces back together. A future made of light.”

— Kameron Hurley