Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “They all claim to have been built by the author of the Golden Stone sutras, this guy named Purochana who some wizard historians believe was the guy of that name who also shows up in the Mahabharata, more or less working for the prince of Gandhara.”

— Naomi Novik

202. “I say to you, here are the dangers. Some are more likely than others. Weigh them, put them all together, and you will know the cost. Then you must say, is this what you owe?”

— Naomi Novik

203. “Hush, sweetheart. You don’t have a mother anymore, but let me to speak to you with her voice a minute. Listen. Stepon told us what happened in your house. There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That it what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.”

— Naomi Novik

204. “Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.”

— Naomi Novik

205. “I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn’t belong in their lives at all.”

— Naomi Novik

206. “He turned a cold certain look over them like the sweep of a scythe. “For however many of them will be left,” he said.”

— Naomi Novik

207. “Well, I don’t know, yet,” the dragonet said, “but I mean to find a way: just because the business will be difficult is no excuse for not making the attempt.”

— Naomi Novik

208. “In short, he tried to teach me as best he could, and to advise me in my blundering through my new forest, though it was foreign country to him. He did still resent my success, not from jealousy but as a matter of principle: it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work, and he scowled as much when I was doing well as when I had made some evident mistake.”

— Naomi Novik

209. “I didn’t know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss.”

— Naomi Novik

210. “As happy as I would be to forgo the very doubtful pleasure of watching you flop about like an exhausted eel over the least cantrip,” he bit out, “we’ve already seen the consequences of leaving you to your own devices.”

— Naomi Novik

211. “I recognized that hunger: a devouring thing that would gulp down lives with pleasure and would only pretend to care about law or justice, unless you had some greater power behind you that it couldn’t find a way to cheat or break, and that would never, never be satisfied.”

— Naomi Novik

212. “I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.”

— Naomi Novik

213. “The Dragon’s tower is a long way in the other direction, a piece of chalk stuck in the base of the western mountains.”

— Naomi Novik

214. “She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.”

— Naomi Novik

215. “It was all right when I did it,” I said, “but when you did it, it was wrong. As though – you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it – ” “There are no hedges!” he roared. “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

216. “We hadn’t taken him prisoner; he’d just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn’t dreaming, but felt he should have been.”

— Naomi Novik

217. “Success excuses all risks.”

— Naomi Novik

218. “But he wasn’t going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he’d drunk Spindle-water, and he’d held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He’d keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn’t feel the lack of them anymore.”

— Naomi Novik

219. “That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.”

— Naomi Novik

220. “You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration school supplies.”

— Naomi Novik

221. “I’m not your dear girl,” Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him.”

— Naomi Novik

222. “The food wasn’t as bad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or into spots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.”

— Naomi Novik

223. “So I put together a street-going rig and came up with the courier.”

— Naomi Novik

224. “You feel like it’s going to rain.”

— Naomi Novik

225. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feel stupid when you mean it.”

— Naomi Novik

226. “But my father’s irritation told me otherwise. I had been a disappointment to him from the beginning, my mother having taken an excessive number of years to produce me, and shortly afterwards miscarrying the overdue son and dying with him.”

— Naomi Novik

227. “I’d want to. If you want, I want.”

— Naomi Novik

228. “I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment:.”

— Naomi Novik

229. “But just because it’s a forty-sixth-order derivative equation or something doesn’t mean that I can’t work out which side of that equation is the guilty one.”

— Naomi Novik

230. “Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”

— Naomi Novik

231. “But I couldn’t just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit.”

— Naomi Novik

232. “We’re going home tomorrow. I’m going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won’t care about anything, except that I’m back. But then she’s going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things.” She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. “But I’m not going to. I’m going to want the things I want, and help them the way I can help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”

— Naomi Novik

233. “When Orion finally got round to dumping me, I wanted to come out of this mess as something more than a school-wide reputation for being a bit of a slapper.”

— Naomi Novik

234. “I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.”

— Naomi Novik

235. “Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.”

— Naomi Novik

236. “All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.”

— Naomi Novik

237. “I’m delighted to report my repaired door slammed shut on his heels beautifully.”

— Naomi Novik

238. “I had people, in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren’t really saying no, they were only saying not this time.”

— Naomi Novik

239. “Knowing how to make a potion that will heal the lining of your stomach after you’ve accidentally drunk some lyesmoke-infused apple juice is its own reward, really.”

— Naomi Novik

240. “You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”

— Naomi Novik

241. “Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.”

— Naomi Novik

242. “The Staryk didn’t know anything of keeping records: I suppose it was only to be expected from people who didn’t take on debts and were used to entire chambers wandering off and having to be called back like cats.”

— Naomi Novik

243. “Something about the aura of future monstrously dark sorceress must put them off.”

— Naomi Novik

244. “More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression, that I shoved it entirely out of reality.”

— Naomi Novik

245. “It’s a bullet-point line in the graduation handbook: As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options.”

— Naomi Novik

246. “He just stopped under one particularly laden tree and earnestly began spreading out a ragged blanket for our picnic, while I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was litally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t. I had already liked him enough to drink the horrible tea-stained hot water he’d brought me, so the answer to that was almost certainly yes, but I wasn’t sure I liked him enough to picnic in the gym with him.”

— Naomi Novik

247. “They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.”

— Naomi Novik

248. “Why don’t I just kill them all as they come in?” Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals. “Shut up, Lake,” I said, having many doubts about his ability to kill a billion mals.”

— Naomi Novik

249. “I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here.”

— Naomi Novik

250. “And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.”

— Naomi Novik