Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.”

— N.K. Jemisin

252. “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

253. “But of course, Bronca herself is the Bronx, and the Bronx don’t trust nobody but the Bronx, so maybe her distaste for everyone else is just as inexorable as Manhattan’s charm.”

— N.K. Jemisin

254. “But if he can find your daughter, he can be the Evil Earth incarnate and you won’t give a damn.”

— N.K. Jemisin

255. “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

256. “But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.”

— N.K. Jemisin

257. “So, I mean, it’s awesome that, uh, you’re a city? Congratulations! I want to be accepting of this new stage in your identity formation.”

— N.K. Jemisin

258. “But human beings, too, are ephemeral things in the planetary scale. The number of things that they do not notice are literally astronomical.”

— N.K. Jemisin

259. “Love is no inoculation against murder.”

— N.K. Jemisin

260. “You understand these moments, I think instinctively. It is our nature. We are born of such pressures, and sometimes, when things are unbearable... sometimes, even we... crack.”

— N.K. Jemisin

261. “Libraries are safe places.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

263. “The stone eater’s arm rises, so steadily that the motion surpasses graceful and edges into unnatural.”

— N.K. Jemisin

264. “It was the oldest of tricks, to sow dissension between groups that had common interests. Good for deflecting attention from greater mischief, too.”

— N.K. Jemisin

265. “Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.”

— N.K. Jemisin

266. “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

267. “So many of our leaders are weak, and choose to take power from others rather than build strength in themselves. And then, having laid claim to what they have not earned, they wonder why everything around them spirals into chaos.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

269. “This new one – who has always and only been male – named himself Bright Itempas, because he was an arrogant, self-absorbed son of a demon even then.”

— N.K. Jemisin

270. “Her family had shown her that love is a lie. It isn’t stone-solid; instead it bends and crumbles away, weak as rusty metal.”

— N.K. Jemisin

271. “But without love of the self, others’ love will never be enough.”

— N.K. Jemisin

272. “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

273. “But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

— N.K. Jemisin

274. “Power is not a thing that can be given.”

— N.K. Jemisin

275. “Veneza laughs, tilting her head back like she’s drunk. “I’m Jersey City, goddamn it!”

— N.K. Jemisin

276. “He smiles with half his mouth and neither of his eyes.”

— N.K. Jemisin

277. “I live the city. It thrives and it is mine. I am its worthy avatar, and together? We will never be afraid again.”

— N.K. Jemisin

278. “Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”

— N.K. Jemisin

279. “A small taste of respect for those who needed it so badly, so that they might come to crave it and eventually seek it for themselves.”

— N.K. Jemisin

280. “He is a beautiful failure.”

— N.K. Jemisin

281. “Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all. So strange that you people venerate it the way you do. What other world celebrates not knowing anything about how life really works?”

— N.K. Jemisin

282. “Complaining about nothing doesn’t seem like coping to you, but okay.”

— N.K. Jemisin

283. “Back when Aislyn was a teenager, she often thought of her mother as dull. Since then Aislyn has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper.”

— N.K. Jemisin

284. “Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

286. “Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others.”

— N.K. Jemisin

287. “Men praise parts of me endlessly. Always the parts mind you never the whole.”

— N.K. Jemisin

288. “Sulking is petulant, pointless anger. Mine is righteous.”

— N.K. Jemisin

289. “Many things have broken him. He holds himself together with spit and endless smiling, but all can see the cracks.”

— N.K. Jemisin

290. “I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.”

— N.K. Jemisin

291. “Real gods aren’t what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived.” She shrugs. “They do jobs – bring fortune, look after people, make sure the world works as it should. They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die.” She shrugs. “It’s duty. It’s normal. Get over it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

292. “Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all.”

— N.K. Jemisin

293. “Some might say it also makes them monsters.” Bronca lifts an eyebrow. “Some, I guess. But I always figure those people must be the ones starting all the fights.” Bronca shrugs. “Abusers know kids like this are the ones who sometimes grow up – if the abusers don’t kill them first – to fix the world wherever it’s broken. Enough kids like this equals the end of abusers.”

— N.K. Jemisin

294. “This land made its natural people brown for a reason, though, ma’am, long before either your’n or most of mine came along.”

— N.K. Jemisin

295. “I don’t doubt your love,” she said. “You are a man made for love, I think. Your eyes make me want to die, there’s so much love in them. But it isn’t real. Real love lasts years. It causes pain, and endures through it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

296. “Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times.”

— N.K. Jemisin

297. “What’s changed, that a stone eater no longer seems alien to you? Only superficial things about him. Everything about you.”

— N.K. Jemisin

298. “Real love lasts years. It causes pain, and endures through it.”

— N.K. Jemisin

299. “This is a terrible thing that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.”

— N.K. Jemisin

300. “Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests.”

— N.K. Jemisin