Top 350 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “It’s a waste of your time to teach them.” This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.”

— N.K. Jemisin

152. “That we’re not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don’t have to feel bad about how they treat us.”

— N.K. Jemisin

153. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

155. “Too many New Yorkers are New York. Its acculturation quotient is dangerously high.”

— N.K. Jemisin

156. “We went through all this for dreams?” Zo asked, frustration creeping into her voice. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What good are those?” “What good are they to humans?” “They aren’t any good. Humans are full of interesting-but-useless features. Crying. Wisdom teeth. Dreams are more of the same.”

— N.K. Jemisin

157. “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

158. “The shake that passes will echo. The wave that recedes will come back. The mountain that rumbles will roar.”

— N.K. Jemisin

159. “All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different.”

— N.K. Jemisin

160. “What can orogeny do against something like that? Keep her breathing, maybe. But breathing doesn’t always mean living, and maybe... maybe genocide doesn’t always leave bodies.”

— N.K. Jemisin

161. “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

162. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

164. “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

165. “Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.”

— N.K. Jemisin

166. “She cannot imagine a world where people who mean well can do any real.”

— N.K. Jemisin

167. “The Darren language has a word for the attraction one feels to danger: esui. It is esui that makes warriors charge into hopeless battles and die laughing. Esui is also what draws women to lovers who are bad for them – men who would make poor fathers, women of the enemy.”

— N.K. Jemisin

168. “Desperation makes for poor stealth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

169. “And Mother does not hate her; actually, she fears Damaya. Is there a difference? Maybe.”

— N.K. Jemisin

170. “In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way.”

— N.K. Jemisin

171. “Stolid, no-meat-on-Fridays Catholics. Aislyn’s strongest memory of them is Grammy telling her how she should dress and carry herself if she wanted a good husband.”

— N.K. Jemisin

172. “But this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform.”

— N.K. Jemisin

173. “But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.”

— N.K. Jemisin

174. “It is the lies he’s telling her – as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life – that really break her heart. He’s said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn’t true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene’s father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.”

— N.K. Jemisin

175. “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

176. “Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.”

— N.K. Jemisin

177. “Nothing is more dangerous than fearful people with a fresh taste of power.”

— N.K. Jemisin

178. “We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them.”

— N.K. Jemisin

179. “Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

— N.K. Jemisin

180. “Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.”

— N.K. Jemisin

181. “It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude.”

— N.K. Jemisin

182. “She knows in this moment that he will never falter, never not be there when she needs him, never devolve into a mere fallible human being, And she loves him more than life for his strength.”

— N.K. Jemisin

183. “Wealth has no value when the ash falls.”

— N.K. Jemisin

184. “The way I see it, a stranger feels like a stranger; a friend feels like a friend. Simple.”

— N.K. Jemisin

185. “Once, after all, I believed I was the finest tool ever created by a great civilization. Now, I have learned that I am a mistake cobbled together by paranoid thieves who were terrified of their own mediocrity.”

— N.K. Jemisin

186. “She feels closer than ever to her father in this moment of utter broken rage.”

— N.K. Jemisin

187. “No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

— N.K. Jemisin

188. “The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.”

— N.K. Jemisin

189. “A commandment,” the man says, spreading his arms, “is set in stone.” Imagine that his face aches from smiling. He’s been smiling for hours: teeth clenched, lips drawn back, eyes crinkled so the crow’s feet show. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate.”

— N.K. Jemisin

190. “Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.”

— N.K. Jemisin

191. “It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that.”

— N.K. Jemisin

192. “The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

193. “Mortals are the sum of many things, Sieh. They are what circumstance has made them and what they wish to be. If you must hate them, hate them for the latter, not the former. At least they have some say over that part.”

— N.K. Jemisin

194. “But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.”

— N.K. Jemisin

195. “Bronca smiles sadly. “Kinda glad I’m not the only one visiting Weirdshitistan, though.”

— N.K. Jemisin

196. “What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?”

— N.K. Jemisin

197. “It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.”

— N.K. Jemisin

198. “You are lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. You’re fire – a warm light on a cold dark night to be sure, but also a conflagration that can destroy everything in its path.”

— N.K. Jemisin

199. “Don’t look back,” Schaffa advises. “It’s easier that way.” So she doesn’t. Later, she will realize he was right about this, too. Much later, though, she will wish that she had done it anyway.”

— N.K. Jemisin

200. “Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.”

— N.K. Jemisin