Top 15 Naomi Novik Quotes

When you speak the future, you shape the future.

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.

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

It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all.

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.

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

“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.

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

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

You feel like it's going to rain.

I love having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful.

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.

Of course I was afraid. But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?

She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.

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.