413 Quotes by 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.

I go to museums sometimes. They're cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.

Calling something exotic emphasizes its distance from the reader. We don’t refer to things as exotic if we think of them as ordinary. We call something exotic if it’s so different that we see no way to emulate it or understand how it came to be. We call someone exotic if we aren’t especially interested in viewing them as people — just as objects representing their culture.

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.

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

cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe.

But it is too late. The tether is cut and we are here. We become! We stand, whole and hale and independent, and our legs don’t even wobble. We got this. Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.

Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son's birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father's hatred.

Words make things real in a way that even memories can’t, so you stop there.