N. K. Jemisin Quotes

This was what I’d asked her to give me. I had no right to complain just because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

You’re abbreviating heavily, not lying. That’s what you tell yourself.

My people didn’t use mysterious powers to track you; we used deduction. Much more reliable.

If they will not love me, fear is an acceptable substitute.

Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.

So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.

Very quickly I fell in with others like me—newcomers, dreamers, young people drawn to the city in spite of its dangers because sometimes, for some of us, tedium and familiarity feel worse than risking your life.

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.

(Book that...everyone should read:) One of the many books by queer and POC authors that are under challenge by conservatives, via your local library. If they’re no longer available at your library because the conservatives got there first, join your local Library Board and fight to reinstate them. Reading–and the freedom to speak truth to power–is part of a framework of equity and justice that is under attack in a way not seen for a generation. Fight for all books. Or else.

Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.

It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy.

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.

Peace is meaningless without freedom.

We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction, occasionally young white women fiction, and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal.

The child in her wanted to do as she pleased, cling to impossible hopes. The woman in her wanted to make sound decisions, succeed even if it meant sacrifice. The woman would win; that was inevitable. But the child would not go quietly.