Nk Jemisin Broken Earth Quotes

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.

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

But for a society buit on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me, and you.

How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?

To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.

But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.

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. Tell 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

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.

Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?

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.

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.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth and master of all.

No, I'm telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me and you.

Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.

But breathing doesn’t always mean living, and maybe… maybe genocide doesn’t always leave bodies.

The Fulcrum is not the first institution to have learned an eternal truth of humankind: No need for guards when you can convince people to collaborate in their own internment.

It's not hate that you're seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren't a person, just like that.

Because that is how one survives eternity,” I say, “or even a few years. Friends. Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.

Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.

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

I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again.'' But we would still be hurt, she thinks.

Some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” they whisper. Like it’s nothing.)

You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.

You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.

The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.

Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.

Everyone _shouldn't_ have a say in whose life is worth fighting for.

Frightened people look for scapegoats.

Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.

(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are).

with the sort of patience one reserves for people who are being particularly stupid but don’t deserve to be told that to their faces because they’ve had a hard day.

So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped.

Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.

This is a terrible thing that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.

And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.

Father Earth thinks in ages, but he never, ever sleeps. Nor does he forget.

Love is no inoculation against murder.

There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.

You know the end to this. Don't you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn't? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

If she hurts him because she loves him, is that still hurt? If she hurts him a lot now so that he will hurt less later, does that make her a terrible person? [...] Is that not how love should work?

The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.

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

Urgency and despair don't get along well.

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

But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.

Much of history is unwritten. Remember this.

Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

Complaining about nothing doesn't seem like coping to you, but okay.

It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own.

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.

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 what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.

This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony.

Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.

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.

It’s a waste of your time to teach them.” This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.

Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others.

They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them.

All that stuff about Father Earth, it's just stories to explain what's wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there's more to the world than there is.

Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

We will never be anything but strange to them. I answer in angry basso push-wave throbs. This is not about them.

As big as the world is, Nassun is beginning to realize it's also really small. The same stories, cycling around and around. The same endings, again and again. The same mistakes eternally repeated.

Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right. Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you.

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father. It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE at the vein, this small and petty creature. This is the bedrock of your life. Father Earth is right to despise you, but do not be ashamed. You may be a monster, but you are also great.

Once, after all, I believed I was the finest tool ever created by a great civilization. Now, I have learned that I am a mistake cobbled together by paranoid thieves who were terrified of their own mediocrity.

All things change in a Season—and some part of you is tired, finally, of the lonely, vengeful woman narrative.

But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.

One person's normal is another person's Shattering." Your face aches from smiling. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe, and you're terrible at it. "Would've been nice if we could've all had normal, of course,but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn.

When a comm builds atop a faultline, do you blame its walls for crushing the people inside when they inevitably crumble? Some worlds are built upon a faultline of pain, held stable—temporarily—by nightmare walls. Don’t lament when they fall apart. Lament that they were ever built in the first place.

How do you do it?” you ask. It’s hard to imagine. Not being able to die even when you want to, even as everything you know and care about falters and fails. Having to go on, no matter what. No matter how tired you are. “Move forward,” Hoa says. “What?” “Move. Forward.

You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.

You'll jigsaw [the broken pieces of yourself] together however you can, caulk in the odd bits with willpower wherever they don't quite fit, ignore the occasional sounds of grinding and cracking. As long as nothing important breaks, right? You'll get by. You have to.

Her eyes are shockingly black—shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she’s wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending. You don’t know whether to be awed or affronted by that.

Nassun frowns. “What’s genocide?” He smiles again, but it is sad. “If every orogene is hunted down and slain, and if the neck of every orogene infant born thereafter is wrung, and if every one like me who carries the trait is killed or effectively sterilized, and if even the notion that orogenes are human is denied … that would be genocide. Killing a people, down to the very idea of them as a people.” “Oh.” Nassun feels queasy again, inexplicably. “But that’s …” Schaffa inclines his head, acknowledging her unspoken But that’s what’s been happening

The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change.

According to legend, Father Earth did not originally hate life. In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life—that was happenstance—but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface. Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth. They poisoned waters beyond even his ability to cleanse, and killed much of the other life that lived on his surface. They drilled through the crust of his skin, past the blood of his mantle, to get at the sweet marrow of his bones. And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child.

Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.

Syl Anagist's assimilation of the world had been over a century before I was ever made; all cities were Syl Anagist. All languages had become Sylanagistine. But there were none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them - even if, in truth, their victims couldn't care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion—unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made. Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth—because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly. The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict. No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

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.