The Broken Kingdoms Quotes

“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.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“You're very lucky... Friends are precious, powerful things - hard to earn, harder still to keep. You should thank this one for taking a chance on you.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Loneliness is a darkness of the soul”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“I have decided to live,” he said quietly.
That, too, was obvious from the way he’d changed in the past year. I felt his gaze as he spoke, heavier than usual along my skin. He had been my friend, and now offered more. Was willing to try more. But I knew: he was not the sort of man who loved easily, or casually. If I wanted him, I would have all of him, and he wanted all of me. All or nothing; that was as fundamental to his nature as light itself.
I tried to joke. “It took you a year to decide that?”
“Ten, yes,” Shiny replied. “This last year was for you to decide.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed me because that meant it was all over the kitchen floor.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Oree," she would say whenever I sought to prove my independence, "it's all right to need help. All of us have things we can't do alone.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“But when I got angry, my nerves sought an outlet, and my mouth didn't always guard the gates.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“We began to call ourselves Maroneh, which meant "those who weep for Maro" in the common language we once spoke. We named our daughters for sorrow and our sons for rage; we debated whether there was any point in trying to rebuild our race. We thanked Itempas for saving even the handful of us who remained, and we hated the Arameri for making that prayer necessary.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Because I think I saw you, yesterday morning when I woke up. I think my eyes worked again, just for a moment, and you were the light I saw.”
― N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Men praise parts of me endlessly. Always the parts mind you never the whole.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“I liked that he lost control, dangerous though it was. I liked knowing I could give him that much pleasure. He was one of the younger godlings, but he had still lived millennia to my decades, and sometimes I worried that I wasn't enough for him. On nights like this, though, as he wept and groaned and strained against me, and scintillated like diamond when the moment struck, I knew that was a silly fear. Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Las buenas intenciones carecen de sentido sin el deseo de llevarlas a la práctica”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Ya conoces la verdad sobre Itempas. Es el dios del calor y de la luz, que todos consideramos cosas agradables y delicadas. Yo antes también lo veía así. Pero el calor, si no se enfría, quema y la luz, si nada la eclipsa, puede lastimar hasta unos ojos ciegos como los míos. Tendría que haberme dado cuenta. Tendríamos que habernos dado cuenta todos. Él nunca fue lo que queríamos que fuese.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priest had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“eyes whose color I would never be able to fully describe, even if I someday learn the words. The best I can do is compare it to things I do know: the heavy thickness of red gold, the smell of brass on a hot day, desire and pride.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Do you try to pick up all the mortal girls you almost kill?"
“Just the ones who don’t scream and run,” he said. And then he startled me further by touching my face, just under one eye. I tensed just a little, as I always did when someone noticed my eyes. Bracing myself for the if only.
But there was no revulsion in his gaze and nothing but fascination in his touch. “And the ones with pretty eyes,” he added.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“... la luz depende de la presencia de otras luces. Si las quitas, el resultado es la oscuridad. Pero lo contrario no es cierto: si eliminas la oscuridad, el resultado es solo más oscuridad. La oscuridad puede existir por si sola. La luz no.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“La soledad es la oscuridad del alma”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“-El cambio existe -dije en medio de un bostezo-.Tenemos que aceptarlo.
-No -replicó él-. No tenemos por qué. Yo nunca lo hice. Oree, yo soy la luz permanente que mantiene a raya la hirviente oscuridad. La roca inamovible que el río tiene que rodear. Puede que no te guste yo. Pero sin mi influencia, este reino sería la anarquía, el caos. Un infierno más allá de la imaginación de los mortales.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“-Puede que haya un modo de que escapemos de este lugar -dijo Lúmino al día siguiente.
(...)
-¿Cómo? -pregunté, pero entonces se me ocurrió una idea-. Tu magia. la recuperas cuando me proteges.
-Sí.
(...)
-Pero ahora estoy en peligro... Lo estoy desde que me secuestraron los Luces. -Y no había ni el menor destello de magia en él.
-Puede que sea una cuestión de medida. O puede que haga falta una amenaza física.
Suspiré. Estaba deseando tener esperanzas.
-Muchos "puede" son ésos. Supongo que nadie tuvo la delicadeza de darte unas instrucciones sobre cómo... funcionas ahora, ¿verdad?
-No.
-¿Pues qué propones, entonces? ¿Ataco a Serymn, y cuando me responda, vuelas la casa por los aires y nos matas a todos?
Hubo un momento de pausa. Creo que mi sarcasmo lo molestaba.
-En esencia, sí. Pero no sería muy lógico que te matara a ti, así que limitaré la cantidad de fuerza que utilice.
-Agradezco tu consideración, Lúmino, en serio.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“El brillo ha sido vuestra paz, vuestra prosperidad, no la de los demás.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“At this point, he pulled me against him. His free hand, the one that wasn’t holding my wrist, fisted in the cloth at the small of my back. It wasn’t a hug; that much I was sure of. It didn’t feel like a gesture of comfort. It was closer to the way he’d held me after his release from the Empty. Or the way I sometimes gripped my walking stick when I was adrift in some place I didn’t know, with no one to help me if I stumbled. Yes, very much like that.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“Where once the world’s people had been required to offer their praises only to Bright Itempas, now we were urged to honor two additional gods: a Lord of Deep Shadows and someone called the Gray Lady.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

“empty”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms