Alexandria Chamberlain > Alexandria's Quotes

“Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

“You can’t shoot me; I’m rich!” Yizhi slips through the opening created.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

“Human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully. Not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don't know yourself in dirt.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds

“Hoosiers aren't quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It's just you've got restlessness in your blood." "I don't," she said, but he went on.
"Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

“black ancestor,”
― A. E. Dean, Not My Country

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful

“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 Fifth Season

“Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth and master of all.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. 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, The Fifth Season

“I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again.'' But we would still be hurt, she thinks.”
― N.K. Jemisin, 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 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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“He looks at Rao. Turns in his seat and looks. Sunil Rao, bane of Adam's career, world saver, royal pain in the ass, and genuinely the love of Adam's life.”
― Helen Macdonald, Prophet

“One model of nostalgia sees it as a psychological response to trauma and discontinuity. A defence mechanism. Big social changes can conjure it. Wars, revolutions, 9/11. People feel dislocated, so they conjure an imaginary past they long to return to. This fantasy place of safety. So nostalgia is emotional and psychological, but it’s also political. Highly manipulatable, either politically or in the marketplace. And that’s what my book’s about. Specifically, on how material history and nostalgia and politics coincide.” She waves her hands around the room. “All this stuff, you know?”
― Sin Blaché, Prophet

“She takes it, flicks through the photographs of the objects picked up at the base. Rao sees her linger on a toy rifle, a red velvet comforter, a plush rabbit, a rocking chair. “Yeah,” she says. “Beautifully curated. Makes me think of the Valley of Lost Things. There’s a chapter called that in my book. It’s a literary device, a place characters visit in stories and find all the things people have lost. These, though”—her voice turns speculative—“seem to me not so much lost things as things made of loss. Where are these from?”
― Sin Blaché, Prophet

“An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.” “Are you Yskandr, or are you Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and that did seem to be the crux of it: Was she Yskandr, without him? Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire