Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There are authorities to choose from,” Tharkay said, “to suit any action, if you like; I prefer to keep the choice a little closer.”

— Naomi Novik

52. “It made me angry, because being angry was better than being afraid.”

— Naomi Novik

53. “We were of the valley. Born in the valley, of families planted too deep to leave even when they knew their daughter might be taken; raised in the valley, drinking of whatever power also fed the Wood.”

— Naomi Novik

54. “It seems to me after a fellow has been mutinied against three or four times, there is something to it besides bad luck.”

— Naomi Novik

55. “I knew myself for the first time in a week, standing on earth instead of polished marble.”

— Naomi Novik

56. “I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back; and as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.”

— Naomi Novik

57. “All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.”

— Naomi Novik

58. “And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn’t count for a thing, but the point was, I now felt deep in my heart that I was in fact a better human being than Magnus or Todd, and hooray, all the prizes for me, but that wasn’t helpful when what I actually needed was reasons why I shouldn’t just wipe them out of existence.”

— Naomi Novik

59. “I will tell you what we shall do: if ever you need to rescue Catherine, or you Berkley, Maximus, I will help you, and you will do as much for me. Then we do not need to worry, I do not suppose anyone could stop all three of us, at least not before we can escape.”

— Naomi Novik

60. “I had a feeling the Summoning wasn’t really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.”

— Naomi Novik

61. “But she hadn’t been able to take root. She’d remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow.”

— Naomi Novik

62. “Do you think I will be able to breathe fire or spit poison?” Temeraire asked. “I am not sure how I could tell; I tried, but I only blew air.”

— Naomi Novik

63. “Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song.”

— Naomi Novik

64. “I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out of my way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.”

— Naomi Novik

65. “My girl, my brave girl had done this. She had gone and come back bloody and she had brought us back the spring. And she had come back, she had come back, which was worth all the spring and more for me.”

— Naomi Novik

66. “But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain.”

— Naomi Novik

67. “Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility.”

— Naomi Novik

68. “And listen to me: what you’ve done here carries power with it, of a different sort. Don’t let Solya take all the credit, and don’t be shy of using it.”

— Naomi Novik

69. “Trying to out-guess Bonaparte; the thought makes my blood run cold.”

— Naomi Novik

70. “We’re meant to go. We’re not meant to stay forever.”

— Naomi Novik

71. “They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn’t pretend to be a neighbor.”

— Naomi Novik

72. “It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

— Naomi Novik

73. “I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.”

— Naomi Novik

74. “I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it.”

— Naomi Novik

75. “Something about that whole process of building the structure of that game turned into a real kind of lightbulb moment for me as a writer.”

— Naomi Novik

76. “His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales. He eyed me and said stiffly, “Don’t land yourself into a boiling-pot, and as difficult as you may find it, try and present a respectable appearance.”

— Naomi Novik

77. “He is mine, too.”

— Naomi Novik

78. “You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?” I.”

— Naomi Novik

79. “It certainly went quicker to throw money away than to make it.”

— Naomi Novik

80. “I had roots, too, but not like that. I could be carefully dug up, and shaken loose, and transplanted into a king’s castle, or a tower built of marble – unhappily, perhaps, but I could survive.”

— Naomi Novik

81. “I did not really need Magretta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and having slipped the hook he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place.”

— Naomi Novik

82. “They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.”

— Naomi Novik

83. “The tsar was holding her hands against his chest, the ring on his finger gleaming pale silver like the tears running in silver lines down his cheeks; he was gazing down at her with eyes shining jewel-green, as though she were the most beautiful thing in the world.”

— Naomi Novik

84. “Everyone says you love a Dragon-born girl differently as she gets older; you can’t help it, knowing you so easily might lose her.”

— Naomi Novik

85. “Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.”

— Naomi Novik

86. “You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things.”

— Naomi Novik

87. “I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them.”

— Naomi Novik

88. “You have not paid for this victory, false one, cheat, and I will give you nothing.”

— Naomi Novik

89. “All of a sudden, I sort of started to feel that I was constrained by the characters as opposed to enjoying them. And that remains for me to this day the line that I know where it’s like, OK, you’re not writing fan fiction anymore.”

— Naomi Novik

90. “I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.”

— Naomi Novik

91. “After a moment, he said, in almost marveling tones, ‘Are you deranged?”

— Naomi Novik

92. “It felt like a war between two endless things, between a bottomless chasm and a running river.”

— Naomi Novik

93. “But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I’d half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.”

— Naomi Novik

94. “My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died,” I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third – that fools should recognize neither.” Irina.”

— Naomi Novik

95. “Lady, though you choose a home in the sunlit world, you are a Staryk queen indeed.”

— Naomi Novik

96. “It seems perfectly plain to me that it is war itself which must be halted, without wanting one side or another defeated in particular.”

— Naomi Novik

97. “Temeraire – Never fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something – L.”

— Naomi Novik

98. “I had hated him, but I wouldn’t have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn’t a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.”

— Naomi Novik

99. “I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn’t have been able to just sneak up on me.”

— Naomi Novik

100. “He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.”

— Naomi Novik