413 Quotes by 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.

A commandment,” the man says, spreading his arms, “is set in stone.” Imagine that his face aches from smiling. He’s been smiling for hours: teeth clenched, lips drawn back, eyes crinkled so the crow’s feet show. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate.

She is such a good child at her core. Don’t be angry with her, she can only make choices within the limited set of her experiences. And it isn’t her fault that so many of those experiences have been terrible. Marvel instead at how easily she loves, how thoroughly. Love enough to change the world. She learned how to love like this from somewhere.

There is no word for such a catastrophe. It would liquefy the surface of the planet, vaporizing the oceans and sterilizing everything from the mantle up. The world, for us and any possible creature that might ever evolve in the future to hurt the Earth, would end. The Earth itself would be fine, however.

That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealous, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.

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

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

Grief sounds like a bad thing,” I said, frowning. “Why don’t you and Naha and Mama get rid of it?” “That would require removing love from existence.

This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another.