“For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Them them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“We aren't human."
"Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Nothing to do but follow your crazy,”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me, and you.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“think you hate me because… I’m someone you can hate. I’m here, I’m handy. But what you really hate is the world.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“You must remember, though, that most normal people have never seen an orogene, let alone had to do business with one, and—” She spreads her hands. “Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?” “Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.” Rust this. This woman doesn’t deserve the effort of her explanation. Syen decides to save that for someone who matters. “And that’s a really shitty apology. ‘I’m sorry you’re so abnormal that I can’t manage to treat you like a human being.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive. But”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Listen, listen, listen well. There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.)”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it’s all the same thing.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“We must be polite, Syen,” he says. He’s still smiling, but he’s furious; she can tell because he’s flashing too many teeth. “We’re only orogenes, after all. And this is a member of the Stillness’s most esteemed use-caste. We are merely here to wield powers greater than she can comprehend in order to save her region’s economy, while she—” He waggles a finger at the woman, not even trying to hide his sarcasm. “She is a pedantic minor bureaucrat. But I’m sure she’s a very important pedantic minor bureaucrat.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“You’ve read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“The children of the Fulcrum are all different: different ages, different colors, different shapes. Some speak Sanze-mat with different accents, having originated from different parts of the world. One girl has sharp teeth because it is her race's custom to file them; another boy has no penis, though he stuffs a sock into his underwear after every shower; another girl has rarely had regular meals and wolfs down every one like she's still starving. (The instructors keep finding food hidden in and around her bed. They make her eat it, all of it, in front of them, even if it makes her sick.) One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“But this is what it means to be civilized—doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“You know how these things are supposed to work, right? The good-looking popular guy suddenly shows interest in the mousy girl from the country. Everyone hates her for it, but she starts to gain confidence in herself. Then the guy betrays her and regrets it. It’s awful, but afterward she ‘finds herself,’ realizes she doesn’t need him, and maybe there’s some other stuff that happens”—he waggles his fingers in the air—“and finally she turns into the most beautiful girl ever because she likes herself. But it won’t work at all if you don’t stammer and blush and pretend you don’t like me.” She’s”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“And what do they even call this? It's not a threesome, or a love triangle. It's a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Beware ground on loose rock. Beware hale strangers. Beware sudden silence.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“A commandment,” the man says, spreading his arms, “is set in stone.” Imagine that his face aches from smiling. He’s been smiling for hours: teeth clenched, lips drawn back, eyes crinkled so the crow’s feet show. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
N.K. Jemisin
Born place: in The United States
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“Love token? So far you've given me a farthing charm and a book of manners I don't need. No wonder you idiots need a tournament to get married." Tress”
― Megan Derr, quote from Tournament of Losers
“Mr. Charismo? Surely not Tibor Charismo, the most famous man in all of England.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Reluctant Assassin
“The dead always have stories to tell. They just need the living to listen.”
― Jennifer Latham, quote from Dreamland Burning
“I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.”
― quote from Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
“We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies." Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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