Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Men who served anyone could be trusted by no one.”

— N.K. Jemisin

203. “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

204. “What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else. As soon as those people left, the paralysis ended.”

— N.K. Jemisin

205. “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

206. “You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you – again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise – that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.”

— N.K. Jemisin

207. “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

208. “They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them.”

— N.K. Jemisin

209. “She wants to yell at him: Say you won’t hurt Schaffa again! Even though it feels wrong to yell at any adult. Yet she has also spent the past year and a half learning that adults are people, and sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes somebody should yell at them.”

— N.K. Jemisin

210. “The opposite of liking is not disliking, after all. The opposite of liking is apathy.”

— N.K. Jemisin

211. “He is older, crueler, more experienced, perhaps stronger, but survival has never really been the province of the fittest. Merely the hungriest.”

— N.K. Jemisin

212. “Dread works best in complete silence.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

214. “I remembered Nahadoth’s lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn’t something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man’s strength had its limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork – for every caress that sent a woman’s head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

216. “There is no word for such a catastrophe. It would liquefy the surface of the planet, vaporizing the oceans and sterilizing everything from the mantle up. The world, for us and any possible creature that might ever evolve in the future to hurt the Earth, would end. The Earth itself would be fine, however.”

— N.K. Jemisin

217. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

219. “It’s also frustrating that you care, and that others can tell you care. You used to be such a steelheart.”

— N.K. Jemisin

220. “Oree,” she would say whenever I sought to prove my independence, “it’s all right to need help. All of us have things we can’t do alone.”

— N.K. Jemisin

221. “The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop’s eyes.”

— N.K. Jemisin

222. “That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealous, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

224. “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

225. “Everyone breaks, if torture goes on long enough. The mind bears the unbearable by going elsewhere.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

227. “Nothing human beings do is set in stone – and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to. People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

228. “The Woman then takes Aislyn’s hand and pumps it, too virogously. “Yes. Pleasedtomeetyou is appropriate, yes? We’re both composite entites for whom the boundaries of space, time, and flesh have meaning! Let’s be besties.”

— N.K. Jemisin

229. “Psychotic breaks must be hell on inner ear balance.”

— N.K. Jemisin

230. “Would’ve been nice if we could’ve all had normal, of course, but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn.”

— N.K. Jemisin

231. “Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality.”

— N.K. Jemisin

232. “What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else. As soon as those people left, the paralysis ended.”

— N.K. Jemisin

233. “Maybe she’s a Canadian who has been driven mad by the cold and socialized medicine.”

— N.K. Jemisin

234. “He blinks, then chuckles a little, relaxing as if Bronca calling a spade a spade has finally made him feel better about the whole thing. Probably gets laid a lot with that face, but no idea how to do an actual relationship. Also figures that the personification of Manhattan is two-spirit, too. She snorts a little at the thought. Maybe Stonewall was worth something after all. Anyway.”

— N.K. Jemisin

235. “Inevitable is not the same as immediate, Sieh – and love does not mandate forgiveness.”

— N.K. Jemisin

236. “You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”

— N.K. Jemisin

237. “Alas: in the Stillness, destroying mountains is as easy as an orogene toddler’s temper tantrum. Destroying a people takes only a bit more effort.”

— N.K. Jemisin

238. “I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again.″ But we would still be hurt, she thinks.”

— N.K. Jemisin

239. “Have to watch that. When I’m frustrated, I speak too much truth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

240. “You’ve never really trusted him, though you don’t understand why. Something about the fact that he’s hidden all his life – which is hypocritical as hell after your ten years in Tirimo.”

— N.K. Jemisin

241. “It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own.”

— N.K. Jemisin

242. “I pushed myself away from the wall. “My mother lived truer to the Bright than you ever could!” Dekarta stopped, and for a heartbeat I felt fear, realizing I had gone too far. But he did not turn back. “That is true,” Dekarta said, his voice very soft. “Your mother wouldn’t have shown any mercy at all.”

— N.K. Jemisin

243. “There was nothing we mortals would not do when it came to protecting our loved ones.”

— N.K. Jemisin

244. “Never forget what you are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

245. “When we say that “the world has ended,” remember – it is usually a lie. The planet is just fine.”

— N.K. Jemisin

246. “There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.”

— N.K. Jemisin

247. “You’re right,” he says. “I’ve been crazy for years. If you stay with me for long, you will be, too. If you see enough of this, and understand enough of what it all means.” He lets out a long sigh.”

— N.K. Jemisin

248. “It was important, they’d told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths had enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every part of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed. To kill under those circumstances, or to survive, was respectful. To kill for any other reason was monstrous.”

— N.K. Jemisin

249. “His faith sustains him – and faith is so easy to break.”

— N.K. Jemisin

250. “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