Top 300 Naomi Novik Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

257. “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

258. “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

259. “When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.”

— Naomi Novik

260. “You should pack up your statuary and go home.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

262. “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

263. “De Draak keerde zich weer naar me om. ‘Je bent er dus in geslaagd manschappen hierheen te halen,’ merkte hij sarcastisch op.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “I swung my feet off the bed and got on my shoes, and then Liu opened the door and we all jumped back, because Orion was standing right outside like a creeper. He jumped himself, so it wasn’t that he’d actually been planning to ambush me; I could only guess that he’d been standing there working himself up to knocking.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

270. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

272. “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

273. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists.”

— Naomi Novik

274. “El, I love you so much.”

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— 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. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

288. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

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

— Naomi Novik

295. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

297. “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

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

— Naomi Novik

299. “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

300. “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