413 Quotes by N.K. Jemisin

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.

I have a son of my flesh already, and I have a woman who loves me and wants me, but they’re both half-wild. They flee into the desert whenever I try to love them back. If I were a less confident man, I might become concerned.

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.

What we are, what we’re made of, is many worlds coming together. Reality and legends. This world where we’re just people, and that world, where we can be miles-wide cities that just happen to be sitting a couple of feet across from each other because the laws of space, physics, don’t work the same way.

The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

Beware ground on loose rock. Beware hale strangers. Beware sudden silence.

I pushed myself away from the wall. “My mother lived truer to the Bright than you ever could!” Dekarta stopped, and for a heartbeat I felt fear, realizing I had gone too far. But he did not turn back. “That is true,” Dekarta said, his voice very soft. “Your mother wouldn’t have shown any mercy at all.

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.

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.