Top 200 Naomi Alderman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When a multitude speak with one voice, that is strength and that is power.”

— Naomi Alderman

2. “As it is written: “She cuppeth the lightning in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.” from the Book of Eve, 13–17.”

— Naomi Alderman

3. “You can’t solve anyone else’s life for them. But then, if you see someone struggling with a heavy load, isn’t it forbidden to walk on without helping them?”

— Naomi Alderman

4. “We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.”

— Naomi Alderman

5. “However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that.”

— Naomi Alderman

6. “Silence is not power. It’s not strength. Silence is the means by which the weak remain weak and the strong remain strong. Silence is a method of oppression.”

— Naomi Alderman

7. “And all we have, in the end, are the choices we make.”

— Naomi Alderman

8. “The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree. Root to tip, central trunk branching and re-branching, spreading wider in ever-thinner, searching fingers. The shape of power is the outline of a living thing straining outward, sending its fine tendrils a little further, and a little further yet.”

— Naomi Alderman

9. “Sometimes I think that God is punishing me. For what we did together. Sometimes I think that my life is a punishment for wanting. And the wanting is a punishment, too.”

— Naomi Alderman

10. “What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?”

— Naomi Alderman

11. “When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”

— Naomi Alderman

12. “There is a part in each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act accordingly. Your life depends upon it.”

— Naomi Alderman

13. “One of them says, “Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?” And the other answers, “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.”

— Naomi Alderman

14. “The way we think about our past informs what we think is possible today.”

— Naomi Alderman

15. “I’ve been thinking about two states of being – being gay, being Jewish. They have a lot in common. You don’t choose it, that’s the first thing. If you are, you are. There’s nothing you can do to change it. Some people might deny this, but even if you’re only “a little bit gay” or “a little bit Jewish,” that’s enough for you to identify yourself if you want.”

— Naomi Alderman

16. “We are not ruled by blind instinct like the beasts. Uniquely, we can listen to the commands of God, can understand them, yet can choose disobedience. It is this, and only this, which gives our obedience its value.”

— Naomi Alderman

17. “There was a time when Esti thought that Ronit’s face contained the world, but now, well, it’s just a face. She’s grateful for that, grateful for the change, because it’s not good to see the world in a face that doesn’t belong to you, that’s always turning away from you.”

— Naomi Alderman

18. “Power doesn’t care who uses it.”

— Naomi Alderman

19. “The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

— Naomi Alderman

20. “It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible.”

— Naomi Alderman

21. “Now they will know,” shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, “that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.”

— Naomi Alderman

22. “Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women – with babies to protect from harm – have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.”

— Naomi Alderman

23. “If the world didn’t need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now?”

— Naomi Alderman

24. “For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.”

— Naomi Alderman

25. “When we learn to TOLERATE boredom, we find out who we really are.”

— Naomi Alderman

26. “Every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.”

— Naomi Alderman

27. “It’s been a while since someone last made her laugh. Since she last laughed without deciding beforehand that laughing was the smart thing to do.”

— Naomi Alderman

28. “He’d said, “I am stranded a long way from home and there is no way to get back.” “We all are,” she’d said.”

— Naomi Alderman

29. “Do you think that you are the stars, perhaps? And that I am the moon? I thought you were the moon. But I have been absent, too, you know. I think I have been absent all this time.”

— Naomi Alderman

30. “Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us.”

— Naomi Alderman

31. “They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them. But only exceptional people can bear to look it in the eye.”

— Naomi Alderman

32. “You need that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn’t smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you think of your own.”

— Naomi Alderman

33. “There is no safety that does not also restrict us. And many needless restrictions feel safe and comfortable. It is so hard to know, at any moment, the distinction between being safe and being caged. It is hard to know when it is better to choose freedom and fear, and when it is simply foolhardy. I have often, I think, too often erred on the side of caution.”

— Naomi Alderman

34. “It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.”

— Naomi Alderman

35. “And do you do the same now, with other children? With the children in your care?” But Mrs. Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs. Williams, has always been shrewd, even in her madness. “All children need different kinds of love,” she says. “We do what’s needed to care for them.” Children are born so small. It does not matter if they are boys or girls. They are all born so weak and so powerless.”

— Naomi Alderman

36. “Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune into Fox News.”

— Naomi Alderman

37. “But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us.”

— Naomi Alderman

38. “We did not go out of each other’s lives in a blaze of anger. We simply fell out of the habit of speaking. We lost our common language and so lost everything. There was nothing for us to say.”

— Naomi Alderman

39. “You can’t be the one that hurts and the one that comforts.”

— Naomi Alderman

40. “We are electrical. The power travels within us as it does in nature.”

— Naomi Alderman

41. “Yes. I’m married. But that is a thing between me and Dovid, do you see? And whatever harm you might do to it has been done already. There is nothing more. And whatever pain I may give him, I have caused already. I know that. And whatever God may think of me, He thinks already.”

— Naomi Alderman

42. “The shape of the power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws.”

— Naomi Alderman

43. “Tunde tries to imagine what it’d be like to have one. A power you can’t give away or trade. He feels himself yearning for it, repulsed by it. He reads online forums where men say that if all the men in the world had one everything would be back to the way it ought to be. They’re angry and afraid. He understands that.”

— Naomi Alderman

44. “It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

— Naomi Alderman

45. “Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.”

— Naomi Alderman

46. “You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies.”

— Naomi Alderman

47. “You need a window into another world to work out what you think of your own.”

— Naomi Alderman

48. “Just like a man,” she says. “Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.”

— Naomi Alderman

49. “The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy that land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.”

— Naomi Alderman

50. “When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.”

— Naomi Alderman