Top 350 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.”

— N.K. Jemisin

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

157. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

162. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

164. “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

165. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

172. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

174. “Desperation makes for poor stealth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

187. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

190. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

192. “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

193. “It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.”

— N.K. Jemisin

194. “But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.”

— N.K. Jemisin

195. “Dread works best in complete silence.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

197. “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

198. “I have a son of my flesh already, and I have a woman who loves me and wants me, but they’re both half-wild. They flee into the desert whenever I try to love them back. If I were a less confident man, I might become concerned.”

— N.K. Jemisin

199. “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

200. “I carry the truth within myself, future and past, inseparable.”

— N.K. Jemisin