Naomi Novik Quotes

A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly.

A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp.

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.

By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.

And I wasn’t old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.

Thrice, mortal maiden,” in a rhyme almost like a song, “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself.

I think that a lot of anti-Semitism is historically a deflection of resentment of capital. It’s a deflection of that by the elite onto Jews, who are a convenient population to target. And this was something that happened in Western Europe and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish community became a piggy bank for rulers. These rulers deflected hostility from people who felt themselves being exploited but didn’t understand the system of exploitation.

Uprooted is very much about my mother’s side of the family, who were Polish Catholics. They were deeply patriotic and deeply rooted in their country...Spinning Silver is about my father’s family, and they were Lithuanian Jews who had to escape persecution—not just from the Nazis, but from their own neighbors.

I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something

“There’s no such thing as normal people, I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.

You feel like it's going to rain.

We're all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.

They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them-- this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.

But hope is good strong drink, especially when you can get someone else to buy it for you.