Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

158. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “Desperation makes for poor stealth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

176. “Necessity is the only law, says stonelore.”

— N.K. Jemisin

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

181. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

183. “In the wake of that, Sunandi could do nothing but allow a moment of proper Gujaareen silence. There was something to the custom, she had decided some years ago, of letting a brief passage of time cleanse the air, after dangerous words and thoughts had tainted it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

184. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

187. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

189. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

191. “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

192. “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

193. “She often treats him as though he represents his whole species. He does the same to her.”

— N.K. Jemisin

194. “Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.”

— N.K. Jemisin

195. “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

196. “You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. 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

197. “Let me say only that these vehicles float a few inches off the ground. No animals draw them. No steam or chemical fuels them. Should something, a pet or child perhaps, pass underneath, it will temporarily cease to exist, then resume on the other side, with no interruption of velocity or awareness. No one thinks of this as death.”

— N.K. Jemisin

198. “There was no peace in continuing to do what had already proven unworkable. Sometimes tradition itself disrupted peace, and only newness could smooth the way.”

— N.K. Jemisin

199. “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

200. “Her eyes are shockingly black – shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she’s wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.”

— N.K. Jemisin