The Last Graduate Quotes

“There’s no such thing as normal people, I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“You're the only right thing I've ever wanted.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Mum spent a lot of time in my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I couldn’t be his savior; I had enough to do saving myself.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf - a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“You’d rather run away and wallow in angst than ask for help or anything else horrible like that.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“El, I love you so much.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them…but I can’t be that girl. I can’t be the smart girl. I can only be me.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“ In Sapienta Umbraculum — in Wisdom, Shelter”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Shrivel up and die, you putrescent sack of larva!”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’m not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I’m not going to do anything dumb if you say no.”
“What you mean is, you’ll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“They’re freaked out about Orion.”
“After you’ve only been dating two months?”
“We’re not dating!”
Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards.
“After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.”
“Thanks ever so,” I said dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.”
“To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said.
I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.”
“Catch up already, girl,” she said unrepentantly.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion and mortal terror isn’t really conductive to romance.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“We're going home tomorrow. I'm going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won't care about anything, except that I'm back. But then she's going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things." She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. "But I'm not going to. I'm going to want the things I want, and help them the way I can help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I didn’t need this much more to lose.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I couldn't stop myself going by the gym to watch him, just to poke the sore place. It didn't make me feel any better to watch him thrashing scores of fake mals and gym constructs. I knew he was good at killing mals, I knew he was brilliant at it, but if this plan even worked, there wouldn't be scores, there would be hundreds, maybe thousands, all piling on him at once. But I watched from the doors anyway, every day after I finished practicing, and when he finished his last run we went up to dinner together without talking, my teeth clenched round the words I wanted to say: You don't have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you, at least to shield you; we'll hold a lottery, we'll draw straws. I'd said them already and he'd just waved them away with a shrug and "They'll just get in the way," and he might very well be right, because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Why don't I just kill them all as they come in?" Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals. "Shut up, Lake," I said, having many doubts about his ability to kill a billion mals.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“No matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something to worry about.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression, that I shoved it entirely out of reality.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate