Top 300 N.K. Jemisin Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Her fingers fly across the keyboard with the uncanny speed of anyone younger than thirty.”

— N.K. Jemisin

303. “You meet those eyes and realize, suddenly, that there’s so little left in you which is capable of fear.”

— N.K. Jemisin

304. “He knows this is true, suddenly – and he hates that this, out of the gray undifferentiated morass that is his past, is the knowledge that’s returned to him.”

— N.K. Jemisin

305. “Why do I even love him anymore? Nassun finds herself thinking as she stares at her father.”

— N.K. Jemisin

306. “I don’t know how I feel about a canon anymore... The sheer volume of books that exist out there means that a canon is no longer possible.”

— N.K. Jemisin

307. “He’s waiting for her to say it out loud and violate the unspoken contract that covers white people who are doing everything short of tossing around the n-word in public.”

— N.K. Jemisin

308. “Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world.”

— N.K. Jemisin

309. “Bronca’s not sure how Manhattan makes such a quiet statement sound so awful – but maybe it’s the fact that there is compassion in his gaze, instead of coldness, when he says it. Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.”

— N.K. Jemisin

310. “You’re very optimistic for a possible serial killer. I like that about you.”

— N.K. Jemisin

311. “But I got better. I had some friends slap sense into me, and I listened when they did.”

— N.K. Jemisin

312. “I found it perversely comforting that she had tried to kill me at birth.”

— N.K. Jemisin

313. “Libraries are safe places. They’re warm in the winter. Nobody cares if you stay all day as long as you’re not eyeballing the kids’ corner or trying to hit up porn on the computers.”

— N.K. Jemisin

314. “And I don’t care how they feel. They don’t have to rusting like us. What matters is what they do.”

— N.K. Jemisin

315. “It’s always harder to fight for other people than for the self.”

— N.K. Jemisin

316. “This is the task of the Guardians, little one. We prevent orogeny from disappearing – because in truth, the people of the world would not survive without it. Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools – and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool... and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”

— N.K. Jemisin

317. “Yet here we still are. Were we supposed to mope about our imminent death all that time? I don’t think I have that much moping in me.”

— N.K. Jemisin

318. “I get on the train to go home every day, and sometimes I look around and see all these people glowing. Filled with the beauty of this city.”

— N.K. Jemisin

319. “So, thanks to so much of New York being so damn New York, we okay.”

— N.K. Jemisin

320. “The world isn’t fair – but you can want it to be. That’s a kind of hunger, too.”

— N.K. Jemisin

321. “New Orleans stank to the heavens. This was either the water, which did not have the decency to confine itself to the river but instead puddled along every street; or the streets themselves, which seemed to have been cobbled with bricks of fired excrement. Or it may have come from the people who jostled and trotted along the narrow avenues, working and lounging and cursing and shouting and sweating, emitting a massed reek of unwashed resentment and perhaps a bit of hangover.”

— N.K. Jemisin

322. “My father was a patient, cool-headed man. My temper comes from my mother.”

— N.K. Jemisin

323. “Real family’s the people who are there when you need ’em.”

— N.K. Jemisin

324. “Perhaps, amid so much loneliness, tears become ultimately useless.”

— N.K. Jemisin

325. “Crushes: like butterfly wings against the soul.”

— N.K. Jemisin

326. “Earth’s flaming farts, it worked!”

— N.K. Jemisin

327. “Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete.”

— N.K. Jemisin

328. “Meanwhile there have always been people who hate New York without ever setting foot in it – because they hear too much about it and get tired of the hype, because they “lost” a cousin who moved here from TinyRepublicanVille and turned socialist, because they secretly wish they could live here, too, but are too scared to try, whatever.”

— N.K. Jemisin

329. “Why don’t sports teams have avatars? Why isn’t Gritty immortal and magical by now?”

— N.K. Jemisin

330. “Friendships can transcend childhood,” I said softly when Shahar took the knife. She paused, looking at me in surprise. “They can. If the friends continue to trust each other as they grow older and change.”

— N.K. Jemisin

331. “But I forget myself. Who was I, again? Ah, yes.”

— N.K. Jemisin

332. “Perhaps we can never weed corruption out of ourselves, not completely. But it’s important that we continue to try.”

— N.K. Jemisin

333. “She will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She’s old hat at this by now.”

— N.K. Jemisin

334. “We are amalgamated gods sprung whole from the fusion of belief with reality, but usually, the beliefs are pretty steady.”

— N.K. Jemisin

335. “Not all of the stares were kind. I inclined my head to them anyhow. Their pettiness was not mine.”

— N.K. Jemisin

336. “Syenite brings a truly awful novel someone found on the looted freighter, the sort of thing whose first page made her wince and burst into giggles. Then, of course, she kept reading. She loves books that are just for fun.”

— N.K. Jemisin

337. “As a sculpture, she would be beautiful, if too relentlessly realistic for local tastes. Most Yumenescenes prefer polite abstraction over vulgar actuality.”

— N.K. Jemisin

338. “It is not safe to hate the Arameri. Instead we hate their weapons, because weapons do not care.”

— N.K. Jemisin

339. “The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.”

— N.K. Jemisin

340. “She’s never seen anything so nasty, and she’s a Lovecraftian horror.”

— N.K. Jemisin

341. “I nodded slowly, not allowing myself to feel foolish. Logic had not been part of what I’d done.”

— N.K. Jemisin

342. “And I know what you want, Nahadoth Nightlord, Skyfather and Shadowmother, lifeblood of the universe, flesh of chaos and change.”

— N.K. Jemisin

343. “In fact, EXISTENCE became the universe, and the beings soon became a family, because it was Enefa’s nature to give meaning to anything she touched. I was the first of their many, many children.”

— N.K. Jemisin

344. “So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness.”

— N.K. Jemisin

345. “I liked that he lost control, dangerous though it was. I liked knowing I could give him that much pleasure. He was one of the younger godlings, but he had still lived millennia to my decades, and sometimes I worried that I wasn’t enough for him. On nights like this, though, as he wept and groaned and strained against me, and scintillated like diamond when the moment struck, I knew that was a silly fear. Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.”

— N.K. Jemisin

346. “Gods notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without heartbeats.”

— N.K. Jemisin

347. “You need to believe in yourself more, kunju. Why can’t you be more like that nice lady from Brooklyn? She’s an avatar and a city councilwoman. So accomplished.”

— N.K. Jemisin

348. “Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen – while some new things can tear it apart.”

— N.K. Jemisin

349. “It was like life without breathing, or friendship without love; what was the point?”

— N.K. Jemisin