Top 200 Naomi Alderman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. 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. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.”

— Naomi Alderman

52. “He’s crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he’s known them since the first day Enuma touched him. He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: “At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.”

— Naomi Alderman

53. “We don’t know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro – there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated here “Priest King,” while they named the bronze female figure here “Dancing Girl.” They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations.”

— Naomi Alderman

54. “Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.”

— Naomi Alderman

55. “It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”

— Naomi Alderman

56. “You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor 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. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power. Do not come to me looking for answers, for you must find the answers within yourself.”

— Naomi Alderman

57. “People make what they need for themselves,” says Roxy. “My dad says that. If there’s something you need, something you really have to have – not just want to but have to, you’ll find a way to get it.”

— Naomi Alderman

58. “Allie says: Are you trying to tell me there’s literally no right choice here? The voice says: There’s never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.”

— Naomi Alderman

59. “They have said to you that man rules over woman as Jesus rules over the Church. But I say unto you that woman rules over man as Mary guided her infant son, with kindness and with love.”

— Naomi Alderman

60. “It was like being part of a wave of water,” she says. “A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.”

— Naomi Alderman

61. “There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can’t live that way, even some of the time.”

— Naomi Alderman

62. “God loves all of us,’ she says, ’and She wants us to know that She has changed Her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten. Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.”

— Naomi Alderman

63. “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.”

— Naomi Alderman

64. “Scott once said to me that you belong in three places: the place you grew up, the place where you went to college, and the place where the person you love is. I’d add a fourth component to that: the place where you first sought professional psychological help.”

— Naomi Alderman

65. “At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.”

— Naomi Alderman

66. “It’s enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.”

— Naomi Alderman

67. “Our body is there right now. You did not have to earn a thing. It is a gift. You are a hero every time you step out of your front door to do some exercise.”

— Naomi Alderman

68. “In the beginning, therefore, the most important work is of separation. It is of pulling apart the tangled threads. It is of saying “This shall be separate from that. This shall be water, this shall be sky, and this shall be the line between them, the horizon.” It is of setting a line between them.”

— Naomi Alderman

69. “She wondered if she should have explained herself more clearly. She could not explain herself at all. There were no words, no permitted words, to explain anything that she wanted to say. All the words that could have communicated it had been banned, not only from her mouth but even from her mind. She was reduced to mere actions, which are both more and less than words.”

— Naomi Alderman

70. “Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far.”

— Naomi Alderman

71. “It’s not for us to worry about the men,” she says. “Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.”

— Naomi Alderman

72. “The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent... But we don’t have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we ’ve based our ideas on.”

— Naomi Alderman

73. “Sometimes it’s good to go to war, just to know you can.”

— Naomi Alderman

74. “She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished.”

— Naomi Alderman

75. “Her anger is still pure and white and electric, but she doesn’t feel the sadness of it at all. It’s just a thing she heard about once.”

— Naomi Alderman

76. “But it’s more complicated than you think, how you feel about a person. Sometimes I think that if she’d asked me, even once, to stay, I would have stayed forever. The Rabbis teach that we each hold worlds within us. Maybe both these things are true. But she never asked. And so I had to leave.”

— Naomi Alderman

77. “This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was.”

— Naomi Alderman

78. “Men are no longer permitted to vote – because their years of violence and degradation have shown that they are not fit to rule or govern.”

— Naomi Alderman

79. “All gods are one God. Your Goddess is another way that the One has expressed Herself in the world. She came to you as She came to me, preaching compassion and hope, teaching vengeance against those who have wronged us and love for those who are close to us. Your Goddess is our Lady. They are one.”

— Naomi Alderman

80. “That is how a man speaks. And that is why.”

— Naomi Alderman

81. “We who live in Hendon now like to imagine ourselves elsewhere. We carry our homeland on our backs, unpacking it where we find ourselves., never too thoroughly nor too well, for we will have to pack it up again one day. Hendon does not exist; it is only where we are, which is the least of all ways to describe us.”

— Naomi Alderman

82. “And there was a throbbing in my head, a kind of pressure from the inside, and I found that I was shouting. I can’t remember everything I said. I know it wasn’t all about egg sandwiches. I remember that I said, “It’s no wonder that I hate you so much, because you never listen!” I remember that I said, “I wish I were dead like my mother!”

— Naomi Alderman

83. “The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.”

— Naomi Alderman

84. “All beauty touches the human heart, be it only so small as an ant or a spider.”

— Naomi Alderman

85. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” says Tunde in his voiceover report, because he’s been reading about revolution, “but to be young was very heaven.”

— Naomi Alderman

86. “It’s been a year. There’s been footage on the TV of riots in faraway and unstable parts of the world, of women taking whole cities. Daniel’s right. The critical thing isn’t that fifteen-year-old girls can do it: you could contain that. The thing is that they can wake up this power in some of the older women. It raises questions. How long has this been possible? How did no one know until now?”

— Naomi Alderman

87. “There are more kinds of belonging than you know, Ronit, my joy. The world is not so easily categorized as you might prefer. And you are trying to steal that which you do not even desire.”

— Naomi Alderman

88. “There are those who believe all secrets to be guilty. If the truth is innocent, they declare, why can it not be revealed? The very existence of a secret indicates malice and wrongdoing. All should be open, all exposed.”

— Naomi Alderman

89. “I don’t smoke, not really. Only at parties, I’ll steal someone else’s, and I usually have a few in my bag, in case I’m walking down the street and I want to experience that New York feeling, of being one of those women who wear high-heeled boots and smoke cigarettes.”

— Naomi Alderman

90. “He could not hope to discover, let alone understand, what thoughts moved her as she sat holding his hand to her cheek. He was alone, in the smallness of the room, in the space within him. And yet they were both together, alone. He understood, as if the knowledge had been waiting for him in this windowless chamber. That was, at bottom, what it amounted to. To be alone, together.”

— Naomi Alderman

91. “That those who live narrow lives have only themselves to blame when they find themselves shocked.”

— Naomi Alderman

92. “Mark said to me once, “She’s like God to you: she inexplicably calms inexplicable fears.”

— Naomi Alderman

93. “There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.”

— Naomi Alderman

94. “All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years, but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.”

— Naomi Alderman

95. “Your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and who’s the Holy Mother? Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question.”

— Naomi Alderman

96. “For the earth is filled with violence, and every living thing has lost its way.”

— Naomi Alderman

97. “No wonder we spend our adult lives feeling we’re simply pretending to know what we’re doing. After sixteen years spent doing exams, where the lessons we’ve received perfectly fit the challenges we’re faced with, our preparation for the unpredictable events of normal life will always seem shoddy and haphazard.”

— Naomi Alderman

98. “You do remember,” continues Semple, “that they turned overnight when the Shah fell and the Ayatollah came to power? You do remember that it happens that quickly?”

— Naomi Alderman

99. “All you ever are is a reflection of other people. With Jess you were loyal, with me you’re dissolute. What are you really? Nothing. You’re all shadows and mirrors. All you’ve got is the power to ingratiate yourself with whoever you’re around, to make them like you.”

— Naomi Alderman

100. “It was as though they had never known love: both terrible and wonderful. She had considered them before, the people who did not know Friday. She wondered now if this was how Ronit felt in New York, without lines and demarcations, without order and sense, without anchor. A thing both to be feared and desired.”

— Naomi Alderman