The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

But just because you can’t see or understand a thing doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.”

Now she has the freedom to be fully who and what she is, and she no longer fears that self.

Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic.

Love is no inoculation against murder.

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? “Nassun, please.” Is that not how love should work?

It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things.

“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

Then it’s all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy. (Girl.)

Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all.