Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.”

— 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. “She didn’t mean anything,” Kasia said, brave brave brave, the way I hadn’t been for her.”

— Naomi Novik

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

107. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

110. “I was so tired that I was nothing but my body: the steady dull throb in my thighs, the tremor all along my arms, the thick grime of dust muffling my skin.”

— Naomi Novik

111. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

113. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

119. “There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life.”

— Naomi Novik

120. “I knew it wasn’t going to help me. It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can’t change what’s wrong.”

— Naomi Novik

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Enough of that, you damned conspirators, you will have us hanged a great deal sooner than we will.”

— Naomi Novik

125. “You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing.”

— Naomi Novik

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “What I mean – what we mean by it is – it’s like credit,” I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. “Gifts, and thanks – we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go.”

— Naomi Novik

137. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

142. “All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.”

— Naomi Novik

143. “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

144. “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

145. “I’d chosen- not the lesser evil, but the less immediate one.”

— Naomi Novik

146. “Dragon intelligence was a mystery to men who made a study of the subject; he had no idea how much the dragon would hear or understand, but thought it better to avoid the risk of giving offense.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

148. “There was only me to save me, because no one else cared.”

— Naomi Novik

149. “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

150. “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