Quotes from Naomi Alderman

He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.

I was looking for...the mountain cult," he barks out at last. His throat is dry and his head aches. She laughs. "Yea, well. You found it. So that was a bloody stupid idea, wasn't it?

He'd said, "I am stranded a long way from home and there is no way to get back." "We all are," she'd said.

Sometimes it's good to go to war, just to know you can

At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.

And—who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday?—they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," says Tunde in his voiceover report, because he's been reading about revolution, "but to be young was very heaven.

on the TV. Kristen is saying, The fourth-quarter forecast isn't looking good. Matt is laughing attractively and saying, Now, I don't understand that kind of thing at all, but I'll tell you what I do know about: apple-bobbing.

If the world didn't need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now?

And they're angry, and they're afraid, and then things happen.

You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power. Do not come to me looking for answers, for you must find the answers within yourself.

Never keep someone on a job who likes it too much. She knows when she sees the single flash of that gleeful and hungry face that they're not here to raid for what they can find. They're not here for anything that can be given.

You need that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn't smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you think of your own.

The shape of the power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws.

Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us.

All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

Power doesn't care who uses it.

In her game, she didn't need a gun, or space-helmet, or lightsaber. In the game Margot played when she was a child, she was enough all by herself.

All gods are one God. Your Goddess is another way that the One has expressed Herself in the world. She came to you as She came to me, preaching compassion and hope, teaching vengeance against those who have wronged us and love for those who are close to us. Your Goddess is our Lady. They are one.

There's a sort of constant ease, as if it's high summer all the time inside her.

The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country- Tunde thinks- must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

We who live in Hendon now like to imagine ourselves elsewhere. We carry our homeland on our backs, unpacking it where we find ourselves., never too thoroughly nor too well, for we will have to pack it up again one day. Hendon does not exist; it is only where we are, which is the least of all ways to describe us.

Tom scowls, just a micro-expression, before the practiced face peels over the real one, the smile smooth as frosting on a cupcake.