Naomi Novik

"A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly."

"I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on."

"And I wasn’t old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon."

"A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp."

"I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something"

"A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true"

"Young women aren’t allowed to be selfishly angry. They’re sometimes allowed to be angry in a sort of righteous way for other people, but they are often discouraged from being like, “This is unfair to me. I’m mad for me, and I want these things for me.” I think it’s really important for women to fight against the idea that they’re not allowed to want things for themselves."

"Thrice, mortal maiden,” in a rhyme almost like a song, “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself."

"They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They werent alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them-- this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasnt a whole man."

"But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing."

"The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father’s house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I’d had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I’d never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life."

"I think that a lot of anti-Semitism is historically a deflection of resentment of capital. It’s a deflection of that by the elite onto Jews, who are a convenient population to target. And this was something that happened in Western Europe and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish community became a piggy bank for rulers. These rulers deflected hostility from people who felt themselves being exploited but didn’t understand the system of exploitation."