N. K. Jemisin Quotes

You can't lose faith you never had to begin with.
Ah. So you never believed in the Bright at all?
Of course I believed. Even now I believe, in principle. But when I was sixteen, I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priests had taught me. It's all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they're meaningless.

But love like that doesn’t just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there’s always a little love left, underneath.
Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?

Even our mortal courtesans have been with gods enough to have acquired a certain ethereal technique. He smiled a salesman's smile, though it never once touched his eyes.
That's what you're selling. Not sex, but divinity. I frowned. Gods, Ahad, at least worship is free.
It was never free. His smile vanished. It hadn't been real, anyway. Every mortal who offered a god devotion wanted something in exchange for it—blessings, a guaranteed place in the heavens, status. And every god who demanded worship expected loyalty and more, in exchange. So why shouldn't we be honest about what we're doing? At least here, no god lies.

There is no logic to grief.

Would’ve been nice if we could’ve all had normal, of course, but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn.

It is a massive palace, each spire of which could house a village; its chambers contain dozens of entertainments. All of these become tedious to the point of torment after two thousand years. Hells, after twenty.

I think you’re just so gods-damned certain of your own importance that you haven’t figured it out. So let me make this clear: I don’t care about you. You’re irrelevant. It’s a waste of my energy even to hate you!”

Sky’s forecourt had been designed by my late sister, Kurue, who had understood two key elements of the mortal psyche: they hate being reminded of their own insignificance, yet they simultaneously and instinctively expect their leaders to be overwhelmingly dominant.

Magic is merely communication, after all.
Communication, and conduits.

The pasts that I draw upon tend to be mythic pasts. I’m not super interested in writing historical fantasy. I have done that a few times in the case of subject areas that I felt like should have been explored more, like the Haitian Revolution, for example. But for the most part, I’m more interested in exploring the gods that we could have had. Or these are the creation myths that we could have explored. I’m not super interested in existing mythology, though existing mythology does inform just about everything that I’m coming up with. But that’s more along the lines of, This is how mythology should be structured, so you need to look at existing mythology to understand that. If I’m trying to come up with a secondary world, the goal is to use not too much of the existing world…

I knew what it was at last—the visible manifestation of my will. My power, inherited from my god ancestors and distilled through generations of humanity, given shape and energy and potential. That was all magic was, really, in the end. Possibility. With it I could create anything, provided I believed.

“We will continue to serve you, Lady, whether you’re here or not. What prayers shall we say for you at the dawn and twilight hour?”
She threw me an odd look, as if checking to see if I was joking. I wasn’t This seemed to surprise and unnerve her; she laughed, though it sounded a bit forced.
“Say whatever you want,” she said finally. “Someone might be listening, but it won’t be me. I have better things to do.”
She vanished.

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.

This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers – every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honour, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s ‘identity politics’ –… I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction.

Weapons have no need of friends.