Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I am sick of the quarrels of nations and kings, and I would not give a ha’pence for any empire other than our valley, if that can content your ambition.”

— Naomi Novik

102. “If I could have remembered, at least some of the words would have been wrong: like hearing again a half-remembered favorite tale from childhood and finding it unsatisfying, or at least not as I’d remembered it.”

— Naomi Novik

103. “The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still. I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.”

— Naomi Novik

104. “Four years! My heart was glad as birds.”

— Naomi Novik

105. “They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren’t alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them – this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.”

— Naomi Novik

106. “Feiglings!” Eroica bellowed after them at the top of his lungs as they clawed and scattered his wing dragons.”

— Naomi Novik

107. “I wanted to rub handprints through his dust.”

— Naomi Novik

108. “Anger was a fire in a grate, and I’d never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed.”

— Naomi Novik

109. “I ended up rooming in a dorm that was basically a solid wall of female scientists. And every Wednesday, we would all watch “Star Trek: Next Generation.””

— Naomi Novik

110. “I felt argument coiling in my belly.”

— Naomi Novik

111. “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

112. “I will never let Berkley commit treason, ever,” Maximus said, “but if he did, I would step on anyone who tried to hang him.”

— Naomi Novik

113. “Whatever was carrying me dropped me again with an ungraceful thump, and I lay gasping and throat-sore on the earth – the warm earth, lush with soft green grass, though it silvered with frost in a circle around where the Staryk knelt.”

— Naomi Novik

114. “I wouldn’t hold myself that cheap, to marry a man who’d love me less than everything else he had, even if what he had was a winter kingdom.”

— Naomi Novik

115. “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

116. “I wanted to scream, to weep. I wanted to drag my hand across the world and wipe it.”

— Naomi Novik

117. “My heart broke, but I was not a young girl anymore, afraid of being trapped behind a door forever. I knew the door was safety, I knew the door would not always be closed, and I did not let her out.”

— Naomi Novik

118. “So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. I’d been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don’t mean a token of my regard.”

— Naomi Novik

119. “Fire wouldn’t burn he; blade wouldn’t cut her, no matter how long we hacked away.”

— Naomi Novik

120. “If Napoleon can seek to ascend all the thrones of Europe, I suppose we may go dragging them out from under him.”

— Naomi Novik

121. “Would you believe it’s harder to find a virgin than a unicorn in New York?”

— Naomi Novik

122. “I needn’t be offended every time I have to look at you.”

— Naomi Novik

123. “I looked at Lukas. He did not look very pleased, but he did not look very sad either. He was only giving me a considering eye. I was a pig at the market he had decided to buy. He was hoping I fattened up well and gave him many piglets before it was time to make bacon.”

— Naomi Novik

124. “Angry, I think. I didn’t remember ever being angry before. Anger had always seemed pointless to me, a dog circling after its own tail.”

— Naomi Novik

125. “No; they nearly drowned you, and not even on purpose but only through carelessness. I am not letting them have you back,” Temeraire said.”

— Naomi Novik

126. “And so does pity lead straight to disaster.”

— Naomi Novik

127. “He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.”

— Naomi Novik

128. “I was reasonably sure that my one tried-and-true method of being aggressively rude wasn’t actually how normal people made their friends.”

— Naomi Novik

129. “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

130. “He’d also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha’s daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn’t much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.”

— Naomi Novik

131. “You start with a clear intention, your destination; you gather up the power; and then you send the power traveling down the road, giving the clearest directions you can, whether it’s with words or goop or metal.”

— Naomi Novik

132. “Elsie eyed him puzzledly, and then offered, “Would you like to see my plate?”

— Naomi Novik

133. “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

134. “Then she’d straightened up and announced in irritation, “I’ve fallen out of time,” before vanishing in a great cloud of smoke.”

— Naomi Novik

135. “Laurence did not let anger go, but dismissed it to return later; the battle was not over.”

— Naomi Novik

136. “Rich meant that this room with three beds and a table and chairs and a window filled with glass was something to say sorry for.”

— Naomi Novik

137. “The Dragon hissed under his breath with annoyance: how dare a chimaera inconvenience him, coming out of season.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

139. “No one had made her talk to me, or be in my company. I couldn’t understand why she would have gone to the trouble just to be unpleasant.”

— Naomi Novik

140. “It seems to me that if you wish to apply laws to us, it were only reasonable to consult us on them, and from what you have read to me about Parliament, I do not think any dragons are invited to go there.”

— Naomi Novik

141. “For a moment... I might have been the daughter she’d hoped for... she might have been my teacher and my guide... We might never have been enemies at all.”

— Naomi Novik

142. “I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.”

— Naomi Novik

143. “If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.”

— Naomi Novik

144. “But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just – a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like – it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.”

— Naomi Novik

145. “I thought I could smell the sorcery in him, a sharp pungent mix of cinnamon and pepper and resin of pine, and deep below it burning woodsmoke.”

— Naomi Novik

146. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third – that fools should recognize neither.”

— Naomi Novik

147. “He says to land,” Tharkay translated, with improbable brevity; at Laurence’s frowning look he added, “and he calls us a great many impolite names; do you wish them all translated?”

— Naomi Novik

148. “I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t mirth, it was bitterness. “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”

— Naomi Novik

149. “A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly.”

— Naomi Novik

150. “It’s a lie that matches his desire.”

— Naomi Novik