N K Jemisin Quotes

Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.
N K Jemisin
The children of the Fulcrum are all different: different ages, different colors, different shapes. Some speak Sanze-mat with different accents, having originated from different parts of the world. One girl has sharp teeth because it is her race's custom to file them; another boy has no penis, though he stuffs a sock into his underwear after every shower; another girl has rarely had regular meals and wolfs down every one like she's still starving. (The instructors keep finding food hidden in and around her bed. They make her eat it, all of it, in front of them, even if it makes her sick.) One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.
N K Jemisin
No voting on who gets to be people.
N K Jemisin
Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.
N K Jemisin
The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.
N K Jemisin
She has seen him fight his own brutal nature, and the Earth itself, in order to be the parent she needs. He has helped her learn to love herself for what she is.
N K Jemisin
He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed me because that meant it was all over the kitchen floor.
N K Jemisin
It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defence was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of Darre.
N K Jemisin
It was said that the gods favored fools because they were entertaining to watch.
N K Jemisin
Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?
N K Jemisin
J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.
N K Jemisin
Once upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aStop this. It's undignified.
N K Jemisin
I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.
N K Jemisin
Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.
N K Jemisin
Urgency and despair don't get along well.
N K Jemisin
If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.
N K Jemisin
But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There's not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury.
N K Jemisin
If the first words out of your mouth are to cry ‘political correctness!’, … chances are very, very high that you are in fact part of the problem.
N K Jemisin
You must remember, though, that most normal people have never seen an orogene, let alone had to do business with one, and—” She spreads her hands. “Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?” “Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.” Rust this. This woman doesn’t deserve the effort of her explanation. Syen decides to save that for someone who matters. “And that’s a really shitty apology. ‘I’m sorry you’re so abnormal that I can’t manage to treat you like a human being.
N K Jemisin
That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us
N K Jemisin
Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.
N K Jemisin
Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.
N K Jemisin
Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.
N K Jemisin
We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them.
N K Jemisin
Determination could easily become obsession.
N K Jemisin
Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.
N K Jemisin
Did you know that writing stories down kills them?Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
N K Jemisin
Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps.
N K Jemisin
True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.
N K Jemisin
Everyone _shouldn't_ have a say in whose life is worth fighting for.
N K Jemisin
It is the lies he's telling her - as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life - that really break her heart. He's said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn't true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene's father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.
N K Jemisin
So there was love, once. More than love. And now there is more than hate. Mortals have no words for what we gods feel. Gods have no words for such things. But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always love left, underneath. Horrible, isn't it?
N K Jemisin
But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath.Yes. Horrible, isn't it?
N K Jemisin
Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.
N K Jemisin
But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.
N K Jemisin
You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?
N K Jemisin
You're very lucky... Friends are precious, powerful things - hard to earn, harder still to keep. You should thank this one for taking a chance on you.
N K Jemisin
Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?
N K Jemisin
...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.
N K Jemisin
Inevitable is not the same as immediate, Sieh--and love does not mandate forgiveness.
N K Jemisin
This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
N K Jemisin
All that stuff about Father Earth, it's just stories to explain what's wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there's more to the world than there is.
N K Jemisin
How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?
N K Jemisin
The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.
N K Jemisin
Many things have broken him. He holds himself together with spit and endless smiling, but all can see the cracks. You, though; you are dented, bruised, but intact.
N K Jemisin
In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.
N K Jemisin
He has come to seduce the god of seduction, and oh, has he come prepared.
N K Jemisin
How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.
N K Jemisin
And Mother does not hate her; actually, she fears Damaya. Is there a difference? Maybe.
N K Jemisin
...she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.
N K Jemisin
But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.
N K Jemisin
We aren't human.""Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.
N K Jemisin
They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.
N K Jemisin
It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all - but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
N K Jemisin
We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
N K Jemisin
And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.This genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible… how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me.
N K Jemisin
The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.
N K Jemisin
The younger man stepped away from the table and came toward me, his whole posture radiating menace. Every Darre woman is taught to deal with such behavior from men. It is an animal trick that they use, like dogs ruffling their fur and growling. Only rarely is there an actual threat behind it, and a woman's strength lies in discerning when the threat is real and when it is just hair and noise.
N K Jemisin
Because that is how one survives eternity,” I say, “or even a few years. Friends. Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.
N K Jemisin
I think,' Hoa says slowly, 'that if you love someone, you don't get to choose how they love you back.
N K Jemisin