Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by N.K. Jemisin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer N.K. Jemisin.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
N.K. Jemisin

Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, better known as N. K. Jemisin. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020. Jemisin won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin.

Any woman can face the world alone, but why should we have to?
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.
I remembered Nahadoth's lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn't something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man's strength had its limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork - for every caress that sent a woman's head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.
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!
There is no greater warrior than a mother protecting her child. — © N.K. Jemisin
There is no greater warrior than a mother protecting her child.
The shadows of Ina-Karekh are the place where nightmares dwell, but not their source. Never forget: the shadowlands are not elsewhere. We create them. They are within.
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.
It is important to appreciate beauty, even when it is evil.
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.
If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.
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. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.
This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
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.
Once upon a time there was a Once upon a time there was a Once upon a time there was a Stop this. It's undignified.
...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears. — © N.K. Jemisin
...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.
It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all - but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
Loneliness is a darkness of the soul
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.
We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
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?
There is nothing foolish about hope.
There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.
Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.
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.
There is no logic to grief.
Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.
Determination could easily become obsession.
It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defence was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of Darre.
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.
But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates. — © N.K. Jemisin
But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.
And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal. That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.
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.
But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.
If the first words out of your mouth are to cry 'political correctness!', ... chances are very, very high that you are in fact part of the problem.
Immortality gets very, very boring. You'd be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.
We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them.
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.
Fortunately, where reason failed, blind panic served well enough.
Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?
You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining. — © N.K. Jemisin
You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.
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