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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

203. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

209. “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

210. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

221. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

228. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

230. “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

231. “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

232. “All that stuff about Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

237. “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

238. “But our strength should not diminish yours. It makes us all powerful, together.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

241. “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

242. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

245. “Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.”

— N.K. Jemisin

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “Never forget what you are.”

— N.K. Jemisin

250. “Libraries are safe places.”

— N.K. Jemisin