Top 350 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

203. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

205. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

207. “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

208. “Dread works best in complete silence.”

— N.K. Jemisin

209. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

216. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

218. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

226. “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

227. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

229. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

232. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

235. “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

236. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

245. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

247. “How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.”

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin