Naomi Novik Quotes

A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true

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.

When you speak the future, you shape the future.

But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing.

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.

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

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

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.

I'd want to. If you want, I want.

“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.

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.

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.