N K Jemisin Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.

The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

Determination could easily become obsession.

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

But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath.Yes. Horrible, isn't it?

It is the lies he's telling her - as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life - that really break her heart. He's said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn't true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene's father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.