Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.”

— N.K. Jemisin

102. “Even the smallest act of peace is a blessing upon the world.”

— N.K. Jemisin

103. “Fortunately, where reason failed, blind panic served well enough.”

— N.K. Jemisin

104. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

106. “You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.”

— N.K. Jemisin

107. “Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.”

— N.K. Jemisin

108. “Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

111. “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

112. “Take a nautilus shell; cut it cross section. Gently elevate its swirling, chambered tiers as they approach the tight-bound center, culminating at last in a pinnacle on which we all stood. Note its asymmetrical order, its chaotic repetition, the grace of its linkages. Contemplate the ephemerality of its existence. Such is the beauty that is mortal life.”

— N.K. Jemisin

113. “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

114. “That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due. It.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

122. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

129. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “He has made his fellow citizens happier, and there is no finer virtue by the customs of this gentle, rich land.”

— N.K. Jemisin

137. “Was it really wrong of me to remember the past fondly? It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. But the past was an easy meal after all. I could taste it again any time I wanted in memory and it would always be perfect and true. The here and now though had no recipe. It might be sour or bitter or raw.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

139. “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

140. “It became easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae were fundamentally different, somehow – more sensitive, more active, less controlled, less civilized – and that this was the source of their magical peculiarity. This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

144. “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

145. “Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent... and so very afraid.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

147. “But this is what it means to be civilized – doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all.”

— N.K. Jemisin

148. “And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.”

— 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. “Frightened people look for scapegoats.”

— N.K. Jemisin