Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Have to watch that. When I’m frustrated, I speak too much truth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

256. “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

257. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Libraries are safe places.”

— N.K. Jemisin

262. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

264. “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

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 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

267. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

273. “Love is no inoculation against murder.”

— N.K. Jemisin

274. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

281. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

284. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

286. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

290. “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

291. “He is a beautiful failure.”

— N.K. Jemisin

292. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

294. “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

295. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

297. “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

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin