How Long 'til Black Future Month? Quotes

“Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself … because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: we hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city’s purpose, they believe—not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“He is older, crueler, more experienced, perhaps stronger, but survival has never really been the province of the fittest. Merely the hungriest.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“...for without contrasts, how does one appreciate the different forms that joy can take?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“All you know is what they've told you, and they tell you so little. They think if we don't know anything, they'll be able to keep control-and they're right. How can you want something you've never seen, don't have the words for, can't imagine?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“[...] I'm still hungry and tired all the time, scared all the time, never safe. What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“How much I’ve had to fight my own internalized racism in addition to that radiating from the fiction and the business. How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“People don' need no monster to make 'em do evil-hearted shit. All it take is a brown face, or somebody wearin' old tore-up clothes.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their shock, they share the idea. The evil … spreads.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“So many of our leaders are weak, and choose to take power from others rather than build strength in themselves. And then, having laid claim to what they have not earned, they wonder why everything around them spirals into chaos.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Does that seem wrong to you? It should not. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by those concealing ill intent, of insisting that people already suffering should be afflicted with further, unnecessary pain. This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: we hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“A small taste of respect for those who needed it so badly, so that they might come to crave it and eventually seek it for themselves.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Some wings are organza stitched onto school backpacks; some are quilted cotton stuffed with dried flowers and clipped to jacket shoulders. Some few have been carefully glued together from dozens of butterflies’ discarded wings—but only those butterflies that died naturally, of course. Thus adorned, children who can run through the streets do so, leaping off curbs and making whooshing sounds as they pretend to fly. Those who cannot run instead ride special drones, belted and barred and double-checked for safety, which gently bounce them into the air. It’s only a few feet, though it feels like the height of the sky.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please.
Good. Good.
Now, Let's get to work.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop's eyes.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“I notice that many of my stories are about accepting differences and change … and very few are about fighting threats from elsewhere.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“He has made his fellow citizens happier, and there is no finer virtue by the customs of this gentle, rich land.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“The harbingers of the enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“even the thought of a happy, just society raises your ire so? Though I confess I am puzzled as to why you are so angry. It’s almost as if you feel threatened by the very idea of equality. Almost as if some part of you needs to be angry. Needs unhappiness and injustice. But … do you? Do you?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“people there have not wasted themselves on crushing one another into submission, and this makes a remarkable difference.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“I wanted someone to talk to who would not think me strange; someone who would look at me and not think, How do I control such a woman?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Now I am bolder, and angrier, and more joyful; none of these things contradict each other.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like … like black holes, maybe. Yeah.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ‘hood.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?