413 Quotes by N.K. Jemisin

Then you say, “I want the world to be better.” I have never regretted more my inability to leap into the air and whoop for joy. Instead, I transit to you, with one hand proffered. “Then let’s go make it better.” You look amused. It’s you. It’s truly you. “Just like that?” “It might take some time.” “I don’t think I’m very patient.” But you take my hand. Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins. “Neither am I,” I say. “So let’s get to it.

I live the city. It thrives and it is mine. I am its worthy avatar, and together? We will never be afraid again.

Urgency and despair don’t get along well.

You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.

This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.

Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.

Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

Bronca’s not sure how Manhattan makes such a quiet statement sound so awful – but maybe it’s the fact that there is compassion in his gaze, instead of coldness, when he says it. Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.

Even the smallest act of peace is a blessing upon the world.