N.K. Jemisin Quotes

newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without heartbeats.

There was nothing we mortals would not do when it came to protecting our loved ones.

As for the danger of alienating people with good intentions - well, one of the things that I learned from RaceFail (and also from general experience) was that people with good intentions are the ones to fear most. The overt racists are easy to deal with. You can spot them coming a mile away. But the well-intentioned people are scarier. They might not intend harm, but in most cases they haven't thought about all the racist (and other "-ist") messages they've absorbed from society. They haven't done the basic groundwork necessary to purge themselves of that passively-absorbed "-ism". So they say the most incredibly hurtful, self-absorbed, and utterly useless things, then compound the problem by getting upset when they're called on it. I liken these people to sleeper agents - they seem OK at first, but then they suddenly "activate" and stab you in the back, and then they come out of their fugue and freak because there's blood on their hands and they don't know how it got there and they refuse to accept that they're the ones who put it there, OMG, OMG. Meanwhile, you're on the floor bleeding out, unnoticed because of their histrionics.

The rage of RaceFail made many of these well-intentioned sleeper agents wake up. So while yes, I think the anger risked alienating some of them, I'm fine with that. They were always dangerous; I haven't lost anything by their alienation. The ones who wake up are a gain (or they will be, once they shift from "not causing harm" anymore

Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.

You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you - again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise - that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.

Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.

keep the magma down, at least until it finds another, slower way to wend its way to the surface.

magic redistribution.

The Darren language has a word for the attraction one feels to danger: esui. It is esui that makes warriors charge into hopeless battles and die laughing. Esui is also what draws women to lovers who are bad for them--men who would make poor fathers, women of the enemy.

Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society ... Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.

Eyes whose color I would never be able to fully describe, even if I someday learn the words. The best I can do is compare it to things I do know: the heavy thickness of red gold, the smell of brass on a hot day, desire and pride.

Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin, myrrh, lapis, and jungissa. Four bands of color mark the face of the Dreaming Moon. Red for blood. White for seed. Yellow for ichor. Black for bile.

It is important to appreciate beauty, even when it is evil.

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.

I have decided that I am in love, but love is a painful hotspot roil beneath the surface of me in a place where once there was stability, and I do not like it.

The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop's eyes.

Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?

But Schaffa is a grown-up, and grown-ups need their sleep; that's what her father always said whenever she or Chaga did something that woke him up.

You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.

There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.

We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us– we all dream.

It's also frustrating that you care, and that others can tell you care. You used to be such a steelheart.

But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

Don't be patient. Don't ever be. This is the way a new world begins.

But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.

When the world is hard, love must be harder still.

You know the end to this. Don't you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn't? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

But then you meet somebody fine at the neighborhood block party, or you go out for Vietnamese perogies or some other bizarre shit that you can't get anywhere but in this dumb-ass city, or you go see an off-off-off-Broadway fringe festival that nobody else has seen, or you have a random encounter on the subway that becomes something so special and beautiful that you'll tell your grandkids about it someday.

Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all. So strange that you people venerate it the way you do. What other world celebrates not knowing anything about how life really works?

Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.

We must be polite, Syen," he says. He's still smiling, but he's furious; she can tell because he's flashing too many teeth. "We're only orogenes, after all. And this is a member of the Stillness's most esteemed use-caste. We are merely here to wield powers greater than she can comprehend in order to save her region's economy, while she - " He waggles a finger at the woman, not even trying to hide his sarcasm. "She is a pedantic minor bureaucrat. But I'm sure she's a very important pedantic minor bureaucrat.

Discomfort is understandable. It's the rudeness that isn't.

I hate this city." Veneza laughs. "Yeah, well, you New Yorkers - everybody except the new ones - always say that. It's dirty and there's too many cars and nothing's maintained the way it should be and it's too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and it stinks like unwashed ass most of the time. But ever notice how none of you ever fucking leave?

He has come to seduce the god of seduction, and oh, has he come prepared.

Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others.

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.

There is no logic to grief.

When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt. So

Only learning oneself better, and understanding one's place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.

This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony.

Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.

The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it's all the same thing.

YOU THINK, MAYBE, YOU NEED to be someone else. You're not sure who. Previous yous have been stronger and colder, or warmer and weaker; either set of qualities is better suited to getting you through the mess you're in. Right now you're cold and weak, and that helps no one. You could become someone new, maybe. You've done that before; it's surprisingly easy. A new name, a new focus, then try on the sleeves and slacks of a new personality to find the perfect fit. A few days and you'll feel like you've never been anyone else. But.

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?

It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy.

The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.

We will never be anything but strange to them.
I answer in angry basso push-wave throbs. This is not about them.

Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness.

Necessity is the only law,

Wounds get better. What makes grief get better?" "Nothing. Time can ease it, but nothing ends it.

It's so reasonable that you don't know why you didn't even consider it. Well, you know why. Ykka might be an orogene like you, but you spent too many years being thwarted and betrayed by other orogenes at the Fulcrum; you know better than to trust her just because she's Your People. You should give her a chance because she's Your People, though. "Fine,

Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it.

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

It's the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode.

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.

Love is no inoculation against murder.

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.

Everyone breaks, if torture goes on long enough. The mind bears the unbearable by going elsewhere.

Where there was movement, now there is stillness; its muscles are rock-hard, and that is not a metaphor. Its fur was just the last part of its body to change, twisting about as the follicles underneath transformed into something else. You and the commless woman both stare. Wow. Really. That's what you're thinking. You've got nothing better. Wow. That's

His faith sustains him - and faith is so easy to break.

It's not hate that you're seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren't a person, just like that.

This understanding floats on the surface of Jija's mind for the rest of the day after Renthree leaves. The truth is beneath the surface, a Leviathan waiting to uncurl, but the waters of his thoughts are placid for now. Denial is powerful.

The Cloud Roads has wildly original worldbuilding, diverse and engaging characters, and a thrilling adventure plot. It's that rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn't go where ten thousand others have gone before. I can't wait for my next chance to visit the Three Worlds!

Well, I mean, just the sight of something awful and incomprehensible isn't going to send me off frothing at the mouth," Veneza says. It's nonchalant, but there is a shaken note to her voice nonetheless. "I'm from Jersey.

Embrace love while you have it, priest - from whichever direction it comes, proper or improper, for however long it lasts. Because it always, always comes to an end.

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.

We began to call ourselves Maroneh, which meant "those who weep for Maro" in the common language we once spoke. We named our daughters for sorrow and our sons for rage; we debated whether there was any point in trying to rebuild our race. We thanked Itempas for saving even the handful of us who remained, and we hated the Arameri for making that prayer necessary.

Immortality gets very, very boring. You'd be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.

(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.) Lately

She knows in this moment that he will never falter, never not be there when she needs him, never devolve into a mere fallible human being, And she loves him more than life for his strength.

This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.

Too many New Yorkers are New York. Its acculturation quotient is dangerously high.

Neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope.

True dreamers are both geniuses and madmen. Most lands can tolerate only a few, and those die young.

His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. He cannot free them, not in the practical sense. He's tried before and failed. He can, however, make their suffering serve a cause greater than one city's hubris, and one empire's fear.

I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine.

It is horrifyingly obvious now that getting more attention isn't necessarily favoritism.

You are Insignificant. One of millions, neither special nor unique. I did not ask for this ignominy, and I resent the comparison.
Fine. I don't you like you, either.

Throughout my life as I've sought to become a published writer of speculative fiction, my strongest detractors and discouragers have been other African Americans. These were people who had, like generations before them, bought into the mythology of racism: black people don't read. Black people can't write. Black people have no talents other than singing and dancing and sports and crime. No one wants to read about black people, so don't write about them. No one wants to write about black people, which is why you never see a black protagonist. Even if you self-publish, black people won't support you. And if you aim for traditional publication, no one who matters - that is, white people - will buy your work.

(A corollary of all this: there is only black and white. Nothing else matters.)

Having swallowed these ideas, people regurgitated them at me at nearly every turn. And for a time, I swallowed them, too. As a black woman, I believed I wasn't supposed to be a writer. Simultaneously I believed I was supposed to write about black people - and only black people. And only within a strictly limited set of topics deemed relevant to black people, because only black people would ever read anything I'd written. Took me years after I started writing to create a protagonist who looked like me. And then once I started doing so, it took me years to write a protagonist who was something different.

This is magic we're talking about. It's supposed to go places science can't, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.

The Nightlord cannot be controlled, child. He can only be unleashed. And you asked him not to kill.

I'm tired of being what everyone else has made me," I said. "I want to be myself." "Don't be a child." I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. "What?" "You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I'm tired of your whining.

Home isn't where the heart is. It's wherever the wind feels right.

...tears would have made him feel weak. Men have always been fragile that way.

The world can't hurt you if you just ignore everything that's wrong with it; well, not until it kills you anyway.

I have decided to live," he said quietly.
That, too, was obvious from the way he'd changed in the past year. I felt his gaze as he spoke, heavier than usual along my skin. He had been my friend, and now offered more. Was willing to try more. But I knew: he was not the sort of man who loved easily, or casually. If I wanted him, I would have all of him, and he wanted all of me. All or nothing; that was as fundamental to his nature as light itself.
I tried to joke. "It took you a year to decide that?"
"Ten, yes," Shiny replied. "This last year was for you to decide.

How can we prepare for the future if we won't acknowledge the past?

Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.

Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted?

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.

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us or what poison we've internalized or how hard we've had to work to expel it –

– we all get to dream.

It was important, they'd told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths had enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every part of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed. To kill under those circumstances, or to survive, was respectful. To kill for any other reason was monstrous.

Peace is meaningless without freedom.

They have never believed us human, but we will prove by our actions today that we are more than tools. Even if we aren't human, we are people. They will never be able to deny us this again.

Back when Aislyn was a teenager, she often thought of her mother as dull. Since then Aislyn has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper.

Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.

Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.

Because I think I saw you, yesterday morning when I woke up. I think my eyes worked again, just for a moment, and you were the light I saw.

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.

"Yes. We. Are."" title="N.K. Jemisin Quotes: We aren't human."
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