Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Success excuses all risks.”

— Naomi Novik

202. “Oh, how I’d enjoyed all that sweet crisp righteous anger, my favorite drug: I’d nearly ridden the high straight into murder.”

— Naomi Novik

203. “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

204. “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

205. “The Magnati have all been summoned for the funeral, and I’ll be announcing our betrothal once they’re gathered.”

— Naomi Novik

206. “No one had ever shouted at me in my life: my mother with her quiet voice, my gentle father. But I found something bitter inside myself, something of that winter blown into my heart: the sound of my mother coughing, and the memory of the story the way they’d told it in the village square so many times, about a girl who made herself a queen with someone else’s gold, and never paid her debts.”

— Naomi Novik

207. “He obviously wanted to leave on a snappy comeback, but couldn’t think of one. I suppose he wasn’t ever called on to produce them in the ordinary course of things. After a moment of struggle, he just scowled and stalked out. I’m delighted to report my repaired door slammed shut on his heels beautifully.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

209. “What perfectly sensible advice. It sat in my stomach, an indigestible lump.”

— Naomi Novik

210. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

212. “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

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

— 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. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

222. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

224. “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

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. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— 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 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. “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

233. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

235. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— 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. “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

240. “I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

245. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

247. “It was a familiar sneer: the exact one that filled my own heart every time someone tried to tell me earnestly about how I would really clear my chakras if only I would wear this set of beads or that magnetic copper bracelet. They’d always get wound up when I told them that putting on a thing churned out of a machine from ore that had been strip-mined by underpaid laborers wasn’t likely to improve my mana balance any.”

— Naomi Novik

248. “They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf – a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash.”

— Naomi Novik

249. “For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.”

— Naomi Novik

250. “And yes, fine, but I think after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices.”

— Naomi Novik