Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— 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. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

209. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

211. “Dread works best in complete silence.”

— N.K. Jemisin

212. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

214. “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

215. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

225. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

227. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

228. “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

229. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

231. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

233. “There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion – unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made.”

— N.K. Jemisin

234. “True dreamers are both geniuses and madmen. Most lands can tolerate only a few, and those die young.”

— N.K. Jemisin

235. “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

236. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

238. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

240. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

244. “Never forget what you are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

245. “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

246. “Grief sounds like a bad thing,” I said, frowning. “Why don’t you and Naha and Mama get rid of it?” “That would require removing love from existence.”

— N.K. Jemisin

247. “Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right. Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you.”

— N.K. Jemisin

248. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

250. “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