Top 200 Naomi Alderman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What, then, does marriage teach us? It teaches us to strive for closeness. That intimacy cannot be attained or retained without effort.”

— Naomi Alderman

102. “These things are happening all at once. These things are one thing. They are the inevitable result of all that went before. The power seeks its outlet. These things have happened before; they will happen again. These things are always happening.”

— Naomi Alderman

103. “For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.”

— Naomi Alderman

104. “Never keep someone on a job who likes it too much. She knows when she sees the single flash of that gleeful and hungry face that they’re not here to raid for what they can find. They’re not here for anything that can be given.”

— Naomi Alderman

105. “Tom scowls, just a micro-expression, before the practiced face peels over the real one, the smile smooth as frosting on a cupcake.”

— Naomi Alderman

106. “Not even a stone is the same as another stone.”

— Naomi Alderman

107. “There’s a girl on the beach at high tide, lighting up the sea with her hands. The girls from the convent watch her from the clifftop. She’s waded into the ocean up to her waist, higher. She’s not even wearing a bathing suit – just jeans and a black cardigan. And she’s setting the sea on fire.”

— Naomi Alderman

108. “How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.”

— Naomi Alderman

109. “What can I tell you? Welcome to the human race. You people like to pretend things are simple, even at your own cost.”

— Naomi Alderman

110. “I think that’s what most of us want, really, isn’t it? A challenge that’s just hard enough that we can accomplish it, but it’ll take everything we’ve got. So that there’s no room left in us for the doubt, the worry, the internal crises. We have to let it fill us up because that’s the only way to get the job done.”

— Naomi Alderman

111. “It’s a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren’t expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.”

— Naomi Alderman

112. “The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country- Tunde thinks- must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.”

— Naomi Alderman

113. “The moon was absent, a circle of darkness denoting the possibility of presence, the inevitability of return.”

— Naomi Alderman

114. “It’s like this essential feature of human beings simply doesn’t exist in the full-color magazine world.”

— Naomi Alderman

115. “I came to a long, wide table. Table, it said. I am a table. All that I have ever been or ever will be is a table. And on the table was a book. And the book was him. I knew him y his words. Truthfully, I would have known him if he’d been a lamp, or a pot plant, or a scale model of the Long Island Expressway. But, appropriately enough, he was a book. The words on the cover were simple, good words. I don’t remember what they were.”

— Naomi Alderman

116. “I’d forgotten it was these people I was coming back to: these views, that synagogue full of small, cramped minds, grown twisted through lack of sunlight.”

— Naomi Alderman

117. “I was four years old when my mother died. It’s young enough that I might never think of her. Old enough that the knowledge would always be with me. And I don’t. And it is.”

— Naomi Alderman

118. “I began to appreciate what money can provide: a waterproof imperviousness to the demands of others.”

— Naomi Alderman

119. “A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.”

— Naomi Alderman

120. “We have no wish to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation,” says Margot. “Cultural differences must be respected. I know the President will trust my judgment on this.”

— Naomi Alderman

121. “It wasn’t really as though I wanted either of them. I just expected them to be there when I needed them. I just expected that they’d stay where I put them, wouldn’t cause trouble. They were both so obedient.”

— Naomi Alderman

122. “It is easy to leave, once you are used to leaving. Easy to feel the moment of it approaching, to sense the loosening of the ropes that bound you to the earth. One becomes adept in noticing the absolute apex of love or belief from which it will inevitably decline. There comes a point when one can even begin to love leaving, the only constant we carry with us. The man who wanders forever is not cursed, he is blessed.”

— Naomi Alderman

123. “Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless such a constant matter of human creativity.”

— Naomi Alderman

124. “There’s a sort of constant ease, as if it’s high summer all the time inside her.”

— Naomi Alderman

125. “A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished.”

— Naomi Alderman

126. “I found I was a little overwhelmed by having been told that a single answer of mine was good.”

— Naomi Alderman

127. “Behind his back, he knows the women in the factory are observing the encounter with cold, dark eyes. There’ll be no doubting him after this, there’ll be no asking what he is; they’ll know what he is when they see what he can do. He’s not a man in women’s clothing. He’s one of them, as strong as them, as capable.”

— Naomi Alderman

128. “He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.”

— Naomi Alderman

129. “It is hard now, very hard, but the difficulty is familiar. Her body wants something, and she is denying it.”

— Naomi Alderman

130. “The candidates hit the floor like Travolta, ready with their moves, knowing that the spotlight is going to find them and illuminate every glistening thing: both sequins and sweat.”

— Naomi Alderman

131. “My hand found the kitchen light switch before I could remember that I might not know where it was.”

— Naomi Alderman

132. “We should remember this. Often it may seem that time has taken us very far from our origin. But if we take only a few more steps, we will round the corner and see a familiar place. And sometimes it may seem that in all our traveling we have returned to the place where we began. But although the view may be similar, it will never be identical; we should remember that there is no return.”

— Naomi Alderman

133. “I didn’t think so,” she says. “Let’s work together on this one, OK, buddy? No sense throwing each other to the wolves.” Margot is thinking about her future. You’re gonna pump my gas someday, Daniel. I’ve got big plans. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” She thinks, That is how a man speaks. And that is why.”

— Naomi Alderman

134. “Ease, luxury, and plenty are not shameful, but they are not happiness.”

— Naomi Alderman

135. “I feel instinctively – and I hope you do, too – that a world run by men would be more kind, more gentle, more loving and naturally nurturing. 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

136. “However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box.”

— Naomi Alderman

137. “And – who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday? – they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.”

— Naomi Alderman

138. “The night birds were calling.”

— Naomi Alderman

139. “We are modern. We live modern lives. All we demand is that women keep to their allotted areas; a woman is private, while a man is public. The correct mode for a man is speech, while the correct mode for a woman is silence. I’ve spent a long time proving that this isn’t so. I’ve spent a long time insisting that no one else can tell me when to speak and when to remain silent. So much so that it’s hard for me to tell when I want to be quiet.”

— Naomi Alderman

140. “It is hard now, very hard, but the difficulty is familiar.”

— Naomi Alderman

141. “You can’t get there from here.”

— Naomi Alderman

142. “And they’re angry, and they’re afraid, and then things happen.”

— Naomi Alderman

143. “The power has been passed from palm to palm here for three years now. And the many death-bearing hands of women have a name here: Kali, the eternal. Kali, who destroys to bring fresh growth. Kali, intoxicated by the blood of the slain. Kali, who puts out the stars with her thumb and forefinger. Terror is her name and death is her breathing in and out. Her arrival in this world has been long expected.”

— Naomi Alderman

144. “You can see it on the internet. Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power, or to leap on the unsuspecting, wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

— Naomi Alderman

145. “We travel from birth to death, from past to future, and each second which ticks by is gone forever.”

— Naomi Alderman

146. “She can’t afford to afford to look weak, not at a time like this.”

— Naomi Alderman

147. “All girls born from now on will have the power – all of them. And they’ll keep it throughout life, just like the older women do if it’s woken up in them. It’s too late now to try to cure it; we need new ideas.”

— Naomi Alderman

148. “But consider this: are patriarchies peaceful because men are peaceful? Or do more peaceful societies tend to allow men to rise to the top because they place less value on the capacity for violence? Just asking the question.”

— Naomi Alderman

149. “Age is cruel, and crueller still to women. A woman becomes a ghost when she stops being worth looking at.”

— Naomi Alderman

150. “Oxford is beautiful; its beauty is its plumage, its method of procreation. The beauty of the dream of Oxford, of spires and quiet learning, of the life of the mind, of effortless superiority, all these had beguiled me.”

— Naomi Alderman