Kameron Hurley Quotes

Nyx had killed a lot of people. She'd let even more die through neglect. Rhys was just one more. I'm the same person, aren't I? she thought. She had burned herself up, only to come out the other side exactly the same.Taite's signal would get out, Nyx knew. It would be soon enough to save *her*. But it would not be soon enough for Rhys. Nyx hardened her jaw. Her hands and feet were still tied. They'd stripped her of her most obvious weapons. She could just wait this out.She saw Rhys register that. But there was no shock. Just resignation. He knew her for what she was. Butcher. Monster.The same old monster.
Kameron Hurley
Good luck to you," he said, and she remembered how he had looked at her as she pinned Yah Tayyib, as if she was some kind of monster.Maybe she was.
Kameron Hurley
Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.
Kameron Hurley
Nobody really knows what I am,” Nyx said. “Not until I put a bullet in their head.
Kameron Hurley
Every time Nyx thought she’d gotten out of the business of killing boys, she shot another one.
Kameron Hurley
You started caring about somebody, you did stupid things.
Kameron Hurley
It all came apart once you started caring for something outside yourself.
Kameron Hurley
We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing.
Kameron Hurley
It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring – you just had to get up more than you fell down.
Kameron Hurley
They'd pay attention to me less. They'd judge me by gender, by looks, by weight before anything else. I automatically started every interaction at a disadvantage.
Kameron Hurley
There was a fine line between madness and intelligence.
Kameron Hurley
It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.
Kameron Hurley
I'd internalized an astonishing amount of misogyny growing up that I didn't even recognize until my early twenties.
Kameron Hurley
Systems of racism and sexism and oppression are not systems we choose, but they are ones we inherit and are responsible for perpetuating, or not. When I hear so-and-so was "a product of his/her time" as an excuse for bigoted behavior, I remind folks that there have always been people in every time who did not agree with the bigoted systems they were born into and who actively fought them. The question is, which are we?
Kameron Hurley
The motto above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the prayer language: My life for a thousand.She remembered swearing an oath with that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen. My life for a thousand.
Kameron Hurley
And for the first time, I pity her, because when she says love, I think she really means it. For her, this is love. This is what she does to someone she loves. And I wonder if I am any better, because this is what I did to Zan all those rotations ago. I seduced her until she loved me with all her heart, and when it came time to do what needed to be done, I was willing to sacrifice that love, but she was not.
Kameron Hurley
Ahmed turned, and leaned into him. Kissed him on the mouth again.“I’m pretty fucked up,” Eshe said.“It’s a good thing I’m perfect, then.
Kameron Hurley
What were all of them, really, but bits of something else? Bits of stars?
Kameron Hurley
Most people who watch a fight think it's all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.
Kameron Hurley
We worship the same God and we carry the same sins.
Kameron Hurley
We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.
Kameron Hurley
And there is good money to be made when things are bad.
Kameron Hurley
He's grown into quite the young man since you took him in.""You say that like being a man's a good thing," Nyx said.
Kameron Hurley
The monsters don't live in the belly of the world like they all say. The monsters live inside of us. We make the monsters.
Kameron Hurley
There is nothing I fear more than someone without memory. A person without memory is free to do anything she likes.
Kameron Hurley
I have spent my life battling monsters. It was only in realizing that I was the monster, and choosing to destroy her, that I could save the world.
Kameron Hurley
The secret to leadership is not to be a particularly intelligent person. It is to surround oneself with those far smarter than oneself. And try not to kill them.
Kameron Hurley
War makes monsters of us all. But what happens to those of us who no longer wish to be monsters?
Kameron Hurley
I'm not trying to be mean,' Casamir says.'Intent doesn't always matter.
Kameron Hurley
All I am, and all I love, is war. I don't know who I will be if I stop. The world, if it is to survive, needs a leader, not a warmonger. The world I want to make does not require me
Kameron Hurley
Just keep in mind," Liaro said, "they're not going to remember the words. They'll remember how you made them feel. Make them feel something.
Kameron Hurley
It was men, not God, who had done those things...
Kameron Hurley
Men did not like women to weep. It reminded them of their own failings.
Kameron Hurley
Light doesn’t always keep the dark things away,” Nyx said.
Kameron Hurley
Let's be real: if women were "naturally" anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives
Kameron Hurley
We can pretend all we like that women are equal, ut as long as men and women are continually encouraged to supress the broad aspects of their humanity that we decry as "feminine", we're all screwed. Because it's those things qe celebrate as "other" that make us truly human. It's what we label "soft" or "feminune" that makes civilization possible, It's our empathy, our ability to care and nurtureand connect. It's our ability to come together. To buld. To remake. Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to supress ther "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.
Kameron Hurley
I spent a great deal of my ilfe trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was misereable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap without dissent.But nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off, I'm only really alive when I'm pissing people off anyway
Kameron Hurley
Young white men in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range are often coming to grips with the fact that life isn't as easy as they were promised. I've been there myself. When you realize that life isn't going to hand you the job you want or the woman you want to fuck, you look around for someone to blame, and feminism becomes an easy target. If only women were subservient objects who stayed at home, there would be more jobs open to young white men and more women with no other option but to have sex with them for sustenance. I realize that white-man utopia sounds really pleasing to these guys, but it's basically everyone else's worst nightmare It's not so great for them either, but they won't get that for a long time, if ever.Suffice to say you won't convince them of this in an online comments section, either.
Kameron Hurley
Asking men to cut away their “feminine” traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to suppress their “masculine” traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.What makes us human is not one or the other—the fist or the open palm—it’s our ability to embrace both, and choose the appropriate action for the situation we’re in. Because to deny one half—to burn down the world or refuse to defend the world from those who would burn it—is to deny our humanity and become something less than human.
Kameron Hurley
On reflection, looking at shows like this and considering my own experiences, what fascinated me was that we have so many stories like this that help us empathize with monstrous men. “Yes, these men are flawed, but they are not as evil as this man.” Even more chilling, they tend to be stories that paint women as roadblocks, aggressors, antagonists, complications—but only in the context of them being a bitch, a whore, a Madonna. The women are never people.Stories about monstrous men are not meant to teach us how to empathize with the women and children murdered, but with the men fighting over their bodies.As a woman menaced by monsters, I find this particularly interesting, this erasure of me from a narrative meant to, if not justify, then explain the brokenness of men. There are shows much better at this, of course, which don’t paint women out of the story—Mad Men is the first to come to mind, and Game of Thrones—but True Detective doubled down.The women terrorized by monsters in real life are active agents. They are monster-slayers, monster-pacifiers, monster-nurturers, monster-wranglers—and some of them are monsters, too. In truth, if we are telling a tale of those who fight monsters, it fascinates me that we are not telling more women’s stories, as we’ve spun so many narratives like True Detective that so blatantly illustrate the sexist masculinity trap that turns so many human men into the very things they despise.Where are the women who fight them? Who partner with them? Who overcome them? Who battle their own monsters to fight greater ones?Because I have and continue to be one of those women, navigating a horror show world of monsters and madmen. We are women who write books and win awards and fight battles and carve out extraordinary lives from ruin and ash. We are not background scenery, our voices silenced, our motives and methods constrained to sex.I cannot fault the show’s men for forgetting that; they’ve created the world as they see it. But I can prod the show’s exceptional writers, because in erasing the narrative of those whose very existence is constantly threatened by these monsters, including trusted monsters whose natures vacillate wildly, they sided with the monsters.I’m not a bit player in a monster’s story. But with narratives like this perpetuated across our media, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how my obituary read: a catalogue of the men who sired me, and fucked me, and courted me.Stories that are not my own.Funny, isn’t it? The power of story.It’s why I picked up a pen.I slay monsters, too.
Kameron Hurley
I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them.We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.
Kameron Hurley
I was limited by stories that came before mine.We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?
Kameron Hurley
If you think there’s a thing—anything—women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.
Kameron Hurley
The war had remade her. Reshaped her purpose. Why couldn’t she unmake it again?
Kameron Hurley