Quotes from The Broken Kingdoms

“This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“You're very lucky... Friends are precious, powerful things - hard to earn, harder still to keep. You should thank this one for taking a chance on you.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Loneliness is a darkness of the soul”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed me because that meant it was all over the kitchen floor.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“I have decided to live,” he said quietly.
That, too, was obvious from the way he’d changed in the past year. I felt his gaze as he spoke, heavier than usual along my skin. He had been my friend, and now offered more. Was willing to try more. But I knew: he was not the sort of man who loved easily, or casually. If I wanted him, I would have all of him, and he wanted all of me. All or nothing; that was as fundamental to his nature as light itself.
I tried to joke. “It took you a year to decide that?”
“Ten, yes,” Shiny replied. “This last year was for you to decide.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Because I think I saw you, yesterday morning when I woke up. I think my eyes worked again, just for a moment, and you were the light I saw.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Oree," she would say whenever I sought to prove my independence, "it's all right to need help. All of us have things we can't do alone.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“We began to call ourselves Maroneh, which meant "those who weep for Maro" in the common language we once spoke. We named our daughters for sorrow and our sons for rage; we debated whether there was any point in trying to rebuild our race. We thanked Itempas for saving even the handful of us who remained, and we hated the Arameri for making that prayer necessary.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Ya conoces la verdad sobre Itempas. Es el dios del calor y de la luz, que todos consideramos cosas agradables y delicadas. Yo antes también lo veía así. Pero el calor, si no se enfría, quema y la luz, si nada la eclipsa, puede lastimar hasta unos ojos ciegos como los míos. Tendría que haberme dado cuenta. Tendríamos que habernos dado cuenta todos. Él nunca fue lo que queríamos que fuese.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Las buenas intenciones carecen de sentido sin el deseo de llevarlas a la práctica”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“El brillo ha sido vuestra paz, vuestra prosperidad, no la de los demás.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“-El cambio existe -dije en medio de un bostezo-.Tenemos que aceptarlo.
-No -replicó él-. No tenemos por qué. Yo nunca lo hice. Oree, yo soy la luz permanente que mantiene a raya la hirviente oscuridad. La roca inamovible que el río tiene que rodear. Puede que no te guste yo. Pero sin mi influencia, este reino sería la anarquía, el caos. Un infierno más allá de la imaginación de los mortales.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“-Puede que haya un modo de que escapemos de este lugar -dijo Lúmino al día siguiente.
(...)
-¿Cómo? -pregunté, pero entonces se me ocurrió una idea-. Tu magia. la recuperas cuando me proteges.
-Sí.
(...)
-Pero ahora estoy en peligro... Lo estoy desde que me secuestraron los Luces. -Y no había ni el menor destello de magia en él.
-Puede que sea una cuestión de medida. O puede que haga falta una amenaza física.
Suspiré. Estaba deseando tener esperanzas.
-Muchos "puede" son ésos. Supongo que nadie tuvo la delicadeza de darte unas instrucciones sobre cómo... funcionas ahora, ¿verdad?
-No.
-¿Pues qué propones, entonces? ¿Ataco a Serymn, y cuando me responda, vuelas la casa por los aires y nos matas a todos?
Hubo un momento de pausa. Creo que mi sarcasmo lo molestaba.
-En esencia, sí. Pero no sería muy lógico que te matara a ti, así que limitaré la cantidad de fuerza que utilice.
-Agradezco tu consideración, Lúmino, en serio.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“La soledad es la oscuridad del alma”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“... la luz depende de la presencia de otras luces. Si las quitas, el resultado es la oscuridad. Pero lo contrario no es cierto: si eliminas la oscuridad, el resultado es solo más oscuridad. La oscuridad puede existir por si sola. La luz no.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Do you try to pick up all the mortal girls you almost kill?"
“Just the ones who don’t scream and run,” he said. And then he startled me further by touching my face, just under one eye. I tensed just a little, as I always did when someone noticed my eyes. Bracing myself for the if only.
But there was no revulsion in his gaze and nothing but fascination in his touch. “And the ones with pretty eyes,” he added.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“eyes whose color I would never be able to fully describe, even if I someday learn the words. The best I can do is compare it to things I do know: the heavy thickness of red gold, the smell of brass on a hot day, desire and pride.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“I was growing used to him, I realized bitterly. That had hurt far less than I’d expected.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Perhaps we mortals actually have more than five senses. Perhaps along with taste and smell and the rest there is detecting the special. I see the specialness with my eyes, but others do it in some different way.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“Though it would not be the first lie our family has told until it forgot the truth.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

“I had never seen a godling child before, but I had an inkling they were not all that different from human children. Human children could be merciless, especially when they had power.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Broken Kingdoms

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Popular quotes

“I hate the idea of losing you again. But what’s worse is that I hate you for being gone in the first place. I hate you for not telling me where you were and that you were okay. I hate you for endangering my life, Nelly’s life, and Otis’s life with your lies. And I hate you for letting Mom die, for not protecting her. I hate you.” Vlad crossed the room and gripped the doorknob. It was only then that he realized that his hands were shaking. Before stepping out the door, he whispered, because it was all he could bear to do. “But the worst part is that I hate myself for hating you.”
― Heather Brewer, quote from Twelfth Grade Kills

“What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?”
― Stanisław Lem, quote from The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.”
― Henry Hazlitt, quote from Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

“It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting

“Evening prayer

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.

Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,

And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from Complete Works

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