The Obelisk Gate Quotes

“Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Everyone _shouldn't_ have a say in whose life is worth fighting for.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are).”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“This is a terrible thing that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Love is no inoculation against murder.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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?”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Urgency and despair don't get along well.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Complaining about nothing doesn't seem like coping to you, but okay.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate