N.K. Jemisin

“(This is not a digression.)”

— N.K. Jemisin

“beware love, especially the wrong man”

— N.K. Jemisin

There is nothing foolish about hope.

— N.K. Jemisin

Loneliness is a darkness of the soul

— N.K. Jemisin

“today you are driven by silent, meaningful gazes,”

— N.K. Jemisin

“When the world is hard, love must be harder still.”

— N.K. Jemisin

Determination could easily become obsession.

— N.K. Jemisin

“Earth’s flaming farts, it worked!”

— N.K. Jemisin

“And I don’t care how they feel. They don’t have to rusting like us. What matters is what they do.”

— N.K. Jemisin

There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.

— N.K. Jemisin

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

— N.K. Jemisin

“this would be a very short tale. And you would not exist.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“Some say the Earth is angry Because he wants no company; I say the Earth is angry Because he lives alone.”

— N.K. Jemisin

But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.

— N.K. Jemisin

And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal. That this analogy occurred…

— N.K. Jemisin

Once upon a time there was a Once upon a time there was a Once upon a time there was a Stop…

— N.K. Jemisin

“They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly…

— N.K. Jemisin

“You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“[...] the kind of healer who knows that sometimes one must inflict terrible agony - rebreak a bone, carve off a limb,…

— N.K. Jemisin

“Some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that…

— N.K. Jemisin

“makes him blink and focus through the blur. “You’re Schaffa,” she says. “You are! And … and you chose.” Because that’s important.…

— N.K. Jemisin

“This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce…

— N.K. Jemisin

I'm tired of being what everyone else has made me," I said. "I want to be myself." "Don't be a child." I…

— N.K. Jemisin

“How do you do it?” you ask. It’s hard to imagine. Not being able to die even when you want to, even…

— N.K. Jemisin

It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their…

— N.K. Jemisin

“When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you…

— N.K. Jemisin

“Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin,…

— N.K. Jemisin

“He's not a parasite if she needs him, too, and if she gives what he will not take. (One day soon, she…

— N.K. Jemisin

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims…

— N.K. Jemisin

“Her communicative presence is radiant heavy metal, searing crystallized magnetic lines of meteoric iron, and more complex layers underneath this, all so…

— N.K. Jemisin

“It’s a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to something else. The pebble in the…

— N.K. Jemisin

“Throughout my life as I’ve sought to become a published writer of speculative fiction, my strongest detractors and discouragers have been other…

— N.K. Jemisin

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves,…

— N.K. Jemisin

“I have decided to live,” he said quietly. That, too, was obvious from the way he’d changed in the past year. I…

— N.K. Jemisin

“Who knows when some version of our ancestors first crawled out of the ash and started jabbering at each other? Thirty thousand…

— N.K. Jemisin

I remembered Nahadoth's lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying…

— N.K. Jemisin

“When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper,…

— N.K. Jemisin

“J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore…

— N.K. Jemisin