Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I would savor every moment of my life that remained, suck its marrow, crunch its bones. And when the end came... well, I would not be alone. That was a precious and holy thing.”

— N.K. Jemisin

102. “The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it’s all the same thing.”

— N.K. Jemisin

103. “But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.”

— N.K. Jemisin

104. “We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirable out, but to hoard resources within. And the hoarders were the core of the problem.”

— N.K. Jemisin

105. “Whether you live or die is irrelevant. You are Arameri, and like all of us, you will serve.”

— N.K. Jemisin

106. “This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in – if you’re lucky – oblivion.”

— N.K. Jemisin

107. “When the world is hard, love must be harder still.”

— N.K. Jemisin

108. “Nothing human beings do is set in stone – and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to. People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

109. “Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.”

— N.K. Jemisin

110. “Beware ground on loose rock. Beware hale strangers. Beware sudden silence. – Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse three.”

— N.K. Jemisin

111. “They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life’s value.”

— N.K. Jemisin

112. “There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.” “Only if one knows the knowledge is tainted in the first place.”

— N.K. Jemisin

113. “Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.”

— N.K. Jemisin

114. “No mortal, and probably no god, could comprehend Hado’s life.”

— N.K. Jemisin

115. “Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world – and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow.”

— N.K. Jemisin

116. “Home isn’t where the heart is. It’s wherever the wind feels right.”

— N.K. Jemisin

117. “The harbingers of the enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.”

— N.K. Jemisin

118. “Survival doesn’t mean rightness. I could kill you right now, but that wouldn’t make me a better person for doing so.”

— N.K. Jemisin

119. “There is peace in submission, but sometimes greater peace – lasting peace – in resistance.”

— N.K. Jemisin

120. “Six billion people working toward a goal together is much more effective than a few dozen scrabbling for themselves.”

— N.K. Jemisin

121. “She can’t explain it. Lines of force, lines of sight, mathematical configurations; all of the knowledge that she needs is in her mind, but cannot be reproduced by her tongue.”

— N.K. Jemisin

122. “When things are bad, change is good, right? Change means things will get better.”

— N.K. Jemisin

123. “I don’t bother to explain that just because something is horrible does not make it any less true.”

— N.K. Jemisin

124. “Remember, too, that the Earth does not fully understand us. It looks upon human beings and sees short-lived, fragile creatures, puzzlingly detached in substance and awareness from the planet on which their lives depend, who do not understand the harm they tried to do – perhaps because they are so short-lived and fragile and detached.”

— N.K. Jemisin

125. “They have never believed us human, but we will prove by our actions today that we are more than tools. Even if we aren’t human, we are people. They will never be able to deny us this again.”

— N.K. Jemisin

126. “Well, I mean, just the sight of something awful and incomprehensible isn’t going to send me off frothing at the mouth,” Veneza says. It’s nonchalant, but there is a shaken note to her voice nonetheless. “I’m from Jersey.”

— N.K. Jemisin

127. “It is horrifyingly obvious now that getting more attention isn’t necessarily favoritism.”

— N.K. Jemisin

128. “I like being an orogene, Daddy, she says. His eyes widen. This is a terrible things that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.”

— N.K. Jemisin

129. “And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal. That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.”

— N.K. Jemisin

130. “The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.”

— N.K. Jemisin

131. “And if one tendril has turned a nosy, racist white woman into a conduit for disembodied existential evil, he doesn’t want to see what infected NYPD will become.”

— N.K. Jemisin

132. “She is such a good child at her core. Don’t be angry with her, she can only make choices within the limited set of her experiences. And it isn’t her fault that so many of those experiences have been terrible. Marvel instead at how easily she loves, how thoroughly. Love enough to change the world. She learned how to love like this from somewhere.”

— N.K. Jemisin

133. “Because that is how one survives eternity,” I say, “or even a few years. Friends. Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.”

— N.K. Jemisin

134. “Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.”

— N.K. Jemisin

135. “Embrace love while you have it, priest – from whichever direction it comes, proper or improper, for however long it lasts. Because it always, always comes to an end.”

— N.K. Jemisin

136. “Accuracy is sacrificed in the name of better poetry.”

— N.K. Jemisin

137. “You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.”

— N.K. Jemisin

138. “How much I’ve had to fight my own internalized racism in addition to that radiating from the fiction and the business. How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.”

— N.K. Jemisin

139. “Evil was the most contagious of diseases, so virulent that no herb, surgery, or dream-humor could cure it. One’s sense of what was normal, acceptable, became distorted by proximity to wrongness; entire nations had succumbed this way, first to decadence, then collapse.”

— N.K. Jemisin

140. “Wounds get better. What makes grief get better?” “Nothing. Time can ease it, but nothing ends it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

141. “Frightened people look for scapegoats.”

— N.K. Jemisin

142. “It is important to give just the right instructions. He thinks in loopholes.”

— N.K. Jemisin

143. “Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic.”

— N.K. Jemisin

144. “This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony.”

— N.K. Jemisin

145. “I have decided that I am in love, but love is a painful hotspot roil beneath the surface of me in a place where once there was stability, and I do not like it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

146. “I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priest had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.”

— N.K. Jemisin

147. “She means to wait here with me. I’m glad. Some things are easier when not faced alone.”

— N.K. Jemisin

148. “This understanding floats on the surface of Jija’s mind for the rest of the day after Renthree leaves. The truth is beneath the surface, a Leviathan waiting to uncurl, but the waters of his thoughts are placid for now. Denial is powerful.”

— N.K. Jemisin

149. “You’ve read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

150. “But then, how can they? Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined? That would not be human nature. How fortunate, then, that there are more people in this world than just humankind.”

— N.K. Jemisin