Top 35 Micaiah Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Even worthless things can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life.”

— Micaiah Johnson

2. “It’s a space between worlds, no different from the star-lined darkness I stand in when I traverse. The darkness is worth it, because I know what waits on the other side.”

— Micaiah Johnson

3. “Human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully. Not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in dirt.”

— Micaiah Johnson

4. “Or maybe it’s just easier to think something is impossible than to try.”

— Micaiah Johnson

5. “I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety. I had no idea the chaos I was capable of holding inside me.”

— Micaiah Johnson

6. “Murder has a cycle just like water. In the same way water becomes a cloud, then becomes water again, when blood calls for vengeance the blood from that vengeance calls too. If you plan to give death, it will always return to you.”

— Micaiah Johnson

7. “Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could.”

— Micaiah Johnson

8. “It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.”

— Micaiah Johnson

9. “He should stop me, but he doesn’t, because he’s intelligent and the downfall of all intelligent creatures is curiosity.”

— Micaiah Johnson

10. “But Wiley City is bad at age anyway. They see a fourteen-year-old runner outside the wall and say ‘A suspicious man spotted near the border’, but when a thirty-three-year-old Wiley-ite murder his girlfriend it’s ‘Good boy goes bad’.”

— Micaiah Johnson

11. “I am always pretending, always wearing costumes but never just clothes.”

— Micaiah Johnson

12. “She’s unattainably bright. It makes me want to touch her even if it takes my fingertips, to see her even if I’ll see nothing after. And if I ever dared cross that line, if I ever got close enough to stand in the full light of that star, she’d request a transfer, or order one for me, and everything would be dark thereafter.”

— Micaiah Johnson

13. “Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.”

— Micaiah Johnson

14. “I want to tell her that I’m not even sure I can die anymore, that I think my destiny is this: to watch every version of myself bleed on different ground until I am all that’s left.”

— Micaiah Johnson

15. “Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.”

— Micaiah Johnson

16. “Death can be senseless, but life never is.”

— Micaiah Johnson

17. “Don’t be scared. Don’t regret. Whatever time you had, it was enough. Whatever you accomplished, it was enough. We will remember your good deeds for the rest of our lives. We will forget your wrongdoings forever. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for spending your time in the dirt with us.”

— Micaiah Johnson

18. “Of course, humanity couldn’t just look. We had to enter. We had to touch and taste and take.”

— Micaiah Johnson

19. “I could become the thing I’d always feared, and then I might never be afraid of anything again.”

— Micaiah Johnson

20. “The scientists would say this is all expected, that the pressure in my chest was just the toll traversing took on my most concentrated bones, and that my dreams are the same as the hallucinations in the hatch because they are both just the mind trying to process what it doesn’t understand. And there is a world where they are right, and a world where they are wrong, and I don’t need to know which this is.”

— Micaiah Johnson

21. “Our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.”

— Micaiah Johnson

22. “It’s been written in my stars on more than one Earth.”

— Micaiah Johnson

23. “Because no traverser has ever made a report to enforcement or asked questions, they think they’ve pulled this elaborate ruse on low-level employees. But really, we just don’t care. A job’s a job, and people edging out other people to make money buying and selling something invisible just sounds like rich-people problems.”

— Micaiah Johnson

24. “She’s staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to mark the constellations. It’s not that you can’t make out a shape, it’s that you can make out so many shapes you’ll never know which one is right. If I wanted to, I could read longing in her distance. But if I’m honest, it’s probably just my own reflected back by her indifference.”

— Micaiah Johnson

25. “Why are we, who are so unhappy, fixated on long lives? What is the point? An easy life isn’t a blessing. Easy doesn’t mean happy. Alive doesn’t mean anything at all. Sometimes the path to an easy life makes you miserable.”

— Micaiah Johnson

26. “The only due powerful men recognize is a life – in service or in sacrifice.”

— Micaiah Johnson

27. “Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together. Because I saw myself bleeding out and instead of checking for a pulse, I began collecting her things. I survive the desert like a coyote survives, like all tricksters do.”

— Micaiah Johnson

28. “We are pilgrims at an inn. When we leave is immaterial, because we are only meant to leave.”

— Micaiah Johnson

29. “I believed I was stable. I thought my ability to go to work, to visit my family, to eat and sleep, meant that I was. I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety. I had no idea the chaos I was capable of holding inside of me. Now the only thing “static” about me is the buzzing rush in my ears when I try to think.”

— Micaiah Johnson

30. “We used to believe the universe was stable. We saw its cycles, the reliable circles it traced, and called the pattern static, meaning unmoving Then we learned its wildness – asteroids that leave their own clusters and impact with planets that’ve also abandoned their orbits, everything dancing off track to the music of chaos.”

— Micaiah Johnson

31. “Sometimes, focusing on survival is necessary. Sometimes, it is just an excuse for selfishness.”

— Micaiah Johnson

32. “What do you call science when it answers a prayer?”

— Micaiah Johnson

33. “When I was a kid, I thought the empress was beautiful – and terrible. I hated her for standing next to a monster, for sleeping next to him and never clamping a pillow over his face.”

— Micaiah Johnson

34. “I do not know which way to go, but my eyes are turned toward you.”

— Micaiah Johnson

35. “I know he is, because I am, because of all of us who were told we were nothing will never stop trying to be everything.”

— Micaiah Johnson

36. “I don’t realize how many years I’ve been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone’s undivided attention.”

— Micaiah Johnson

37. “Warlord, emperor, CEO... ” Jean shrugs. “No difference.”

— Micaiah Johnson

38. “Sometimes you have to bleed to know you’re human.”

— Micaiah Johnson

39. “There’s a moment between us. It’s like a snap into focus where all at once she sees me, she finally understands that all my flirting is just hiding in plain sight, just being so obvious she’d never guess she is the one thing on this world that I know and all I want. But then it happens. She looks, for just that first moment, afraid.”

— Micaiah Johnson