Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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 think about them. I thought that I’d listened to her, but it turned out I hadn’t. Privately I’d believed, on some deep level, that everyone was in fact thinking about me all the time, evaluating me, et cetera, when really they hadn’t been giving me much of a thought at all.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

257. “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

258. “I’m glad you and Chloe have become friends,” in an alarmingly hopeful way that was very clearly only one unfortunate literature assignment away from turning into come live with me and be my love, optionally etched onto metal with little hearts around it.”

— Naomi Novik

259. “El, I love you so much.”

— Naomi Novik

260. “To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said. I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.” “Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.”

— Naomi Novik

261. “I love having existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful.”

— Naomi Novik

262. “My lady, I did not think you could answer it, when I took you from your home without your leave, and set value only on your gift. But I am answered truly. You have given fair return for insult thrice over and set your worth: higher than my life and all my kingdom and all who live therein, and though you send my people to the fire, I can claim no debt to repay. It is justly done.”

— Naomi Novik

263. “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

264. “I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic.”

— Naomi Novik

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all.”

— Naomi Novik

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.”

— Naomi Novik

273. “I couldn’t help knowing she would have told me off for giving him the least encouragement, in the strongest terms possible for her, and also that she’d be absolutely right: I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.”

— Naomi Novik

274. “The point being that we still needed a better strategy for graduation than Wait and see if El can keep her big-girl pants on, and here I was whinging on about how nice it would be for me to do something unbelievably stupid instead, like Orion.”

— Naomi Novik

275. “This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.”

— Naomi Novik

276. “I don’t have a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally because I’ve never had one before. But, on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea, we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions.”

— Naomi Novik

277. “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

278. “So he had actually come to my rescue. That was even worse.”

— Naomi Novik

279. “I didn’t need this much more to lose.”

— Naomi Novik

280. “I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.”

— Naomi Novik

281. “If we were going to do an exhaustive search, we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.”

— Naomi Novik

282. “I opened the door expecting to find something really horrible inside, and I did: eight freshmen, all of whom turned and stared at me like a herd of small and especially pitiful deer about to be mown down by a massive lorry.”

— Naomi Novik

283. “Oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion and mortal terror isn’t really conductive to romance.”

— Naomi Novik

284. “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

285. “Small hopes were riches to those who until lately had none, and were to be pursued by every means at hand.”

— Naomi Novik

286. “But I’m not going to get there unless I stick to my pace. Which currently means, drumroll, two hundred push-ups before dinner.”

— Naomi Novik

287. “And then he shoved me through the gate.”

— Naomi Novik

288. “By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like.”

— Naomi Novik

289. “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.”

— Naomi Novik

290. “I think my eyebrows had packed bags and migrated three counties north.”

— Naomi Novik

291. “I was seeing whispers and wind chimes – not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don’t ask me to describe it.”

— Naomi Novik

292. “It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught.”

— Naomi Novik

293. “No matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something to worry about.”

— Naomi Novik

294. “Lots of us up for first run today,” Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say, Well, looks like rain, doesn’t it! when it’s sheeting down and you’ve taken shelter under an awning with five people who’ve all got knives drawn, and you’re quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.”

— Naomi Novik

295. “It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal.”

— Naomi Novik

296. “So I need to know if I can get on a plane and come to you. Because that’s what I want to do.”

— Naomi Novik

297. “When you speak the future, you shape the future.”

— Naomi Novik

298. “Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you.”

— Naomi Novik

299. “I didn’t want her to need to do things like that. I didn’t want her to need a sword.”

— Naomi Novik

300. “Intent doesn’t matter, she’d say, when you’ve really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you’re ever to make things whole between you.”

— Naomi Novik