Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

154. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

157. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Desperation makes for poor stealth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

169. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

181. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— 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. “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

195. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

197. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

199. “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

200. “The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.”

— N.K. Jemisin