Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own.”

— N.K. Jemisin

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “Love is no inoculation against murder.”

— N.K. Jemisin

256. “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

257. “Libraries are safe places.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

260. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

265. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

279. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

284. “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

285. “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

286. “He is a beautiful failure.”

— N.K. Jemisin

287. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— 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. “All you know is what they’ve told you, and they tell you so little. They think if we don’t know anything, they’ll be able to keep control-and they’re right. How can you want something you’ve never seen, don’t have the words for, can’t imagine?”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

293. “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

294. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

298. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

300. “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