Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.”

— Naomi Novik

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “Was I starting to feel evil? Yes. Now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.”

— Naomi Novik

207. “Well, I would have struck him, but I would have had to get up. You have no notion how difficult it is to arrange skirts when sitting down; it took me five minutes together the first time.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

210. “Success excuses all risks.”

— Naomi Novik

211. “I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.”

— Naomi Novik

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

216. “I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense – better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I’d always known and just hadn’t ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I’d never understood.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

218. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “My darling girl, I love you, have courage, my mother wrote, and keep far away from Orion Lake.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

235. “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

236. “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

237. “Mum spent a lot of time in my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them.”

— Naomi Novik

238. “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

239. “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

240. “I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself.”

— Naomi Novik

241. “Nothing changed outwardly, and yet in his essentials he felt as wholly altered as if he had been reborn, since the last time he had set foot upon the deck of a ship: a tide coming in, high and fast, which had swept clean the sand.”

— Naomi Novik

242. “I couldn’t be his savior; I had enough to do saving myself.”

— Naomi Novik

243. “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

244. “Also I hadn’t lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.”

— Naomi Novik

245. “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

246. “My teeth were already clenched with fury by then, with a new addition of lurking anxiety: was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.”

— Naomi Novik

247. “I’d been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn’t going very well.”

— Naomi Novik

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Naomi Novik