Kameron Quotes & Sayings

It was strange how you didn't realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely. — Kameron Hurley

Tea with a Chenjan. What was next? Ahmed thought. Dinner with bel dames? — Kameron Hurley

Nyx had killed a lot of people. She'd let even more die through neglect. Rhys was just one more. I'm the same person, aren't I? she thought. She had burned herself up, only to come out the other side exactly the same.

Taite's signal would get out, Nyx knew. It would be soon enough to save *her*.

But it would not be soon enough for Rhys.

Nyx hardened her jaw. Her hands and feet were still tied. They'd stripped her of her most obvious weapons. She could just wait this out.

She saw Rhys register that. But there was no shock. Just resignation. He knew her for what she was.

Butcher. Monster.

The same old monster. — Kameron Hurley

But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real. — Kameron Hurley

I'm not going to tell you how to start a bug-powered vehicle, I'm just going to put you inside one with somebody who knows how, and send you off on a ride. — Kameron Hurley

The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild. — Kameron Hurley

It will be like that until someone decides to change it. All of it. But how did you change an entire culture? Revolutions were about politics, not perceptions, weren't they? — Kameron Hurley

When we were too frightened to save our own people, we murdered others. — Kameron Hurley

You will learn to love it. Or it will destroy you. Neither is unpleasant. — Kameron Hurley

Good luck to you," he said, and she remembered how he had looked at her as she pinned Yah Tayyib, as if she was some kind of monster.

Maybe she was. — Kameron Hurley

Language is a powerful thing, and it changes the way we view ourselves, and other people, in delightful and horrifying ways. Anyone with any knowledge of the military, or who pays attention to how the media talks about war, has likely caught on to this.
We don't kill "people." We kill "targets." (Or japs or gooks or ragheads). We don't kill "fifteen year old boys" but "enemy combatants" (yes, every boy 15 and over killed in drone strikes now is automatically listed as an enemy combatant. Not a boy. Not a child.). — Kameron Hurley

He recited, "My mother was a bird of fire. She bore me swaddled over the ruined cities of my sisters. We rained a sea of flame upon our brother, and brought them aloft again. Transformed. Our mothers burned the cities. We keep the ruins. — Kameron Hurley

Your haters are not here for a conversation. They are here to keep you from doing your work. — Kameron Hurley

Light doesn't always keep the dark things away, Nyx said. — Kameron Hurley

What if they'd brought some weapon with them, or are launching an assault on the Mokshi right now? How can you or her trust people who are no better than bandits?" I gaze at the human skin stretched over the table. Zan follows my look and quiets. "We are all villains here," I say. — Kameron Hurley

Women in Nasheen didn't grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory. — Kameron Hurley

Nobody really knows what I am," Nyx said. "Not until I put a bullet in their head. — Kameron Hurley

They'd pay attention to me less. They'd judge me by gender, by looks, by weight before anything else. I automatically started every interaction at a disadvantage. — Kameron Hurley

I knew that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how good I became, it didn't guarantee success or recognition. Other people were not going to be better - they were going to get ahead because of who they knew, because of how much money they had, or because they were willing to lie and cheat their way to recognition. — Kameron Hurley

Power is nothing without discipline. Power without discipline is short lived. — Kameron Hurley

Being fucked up is fine so long as you compensate for it. — Kameron Hurley

And next thing you know, six of my best apprentices get purged for minor paperwork discrepancies and perhaps an unreported cock or two. — Kameron Hurley

All I am, and all I love, is war. I don't know who I will be if I stop. The world, if it is to survive, needs a leader, not a warmonger. The world I want to make does not require me — Kameron Hurley

Stories teach us empathy, and limiting the expression of humanity in our heroes entirely based on sex or gender does us all a disservice. It placess restrictions on what we consider human, which dehumanizes the people we see who do not express traits that fit our narow definition of what's acceptable. — Kameron Hurley

The more women writers I read, from Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison, the less alone I felt, and the more I began to see myself as part of something more. It wasn't about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in. * — Kameron Hurley

Inaya showed up a little later with a clean tunic and trousers and long Ras Tiegan coat.
"Thought you'd hand me an abaya," Nyx said.
"Since when have you presented yourself as a real woman?" Inaya said.
"Good point. — Kameron Hurley

And for the first time, I pity her, because when she says love, I think she really means it. For her, this is love. This is what she does to someone she loves. And I wonder if I am any better, because this is what I did to Zan all those rotations ago. I seduced her until she loved me with all her heart, and when it came time to do what needed to be done, I was willing to sacrifice that love, but she was not. — Kameron Hurley

I'm passionately interested in truth: truth is something that happens whether or not we see it, or believe it, or write about. Truth just is. — Kameron Hurley

Reality TV does actually have a message, folks. That message is selling and reinforcing capitalism, ignorance, and the status quo. — Kameron Hurley

We all want a good many things, child, but it doesn't mean we get them, — Kameron Hurley

Humanity is a monster you can never kill. — Kameron Hurley

He picked up her gun. Pointed it at her. Pulled the trigger.
Isabet jumped like a startled lizard.
He handed the gun back to her. 'First tip. Get a new gun. As soon as a Ras Tiegan gun gets sand in it, it's useless. They don't work out here.'
Isabet's hand was trembling as she took the gun back. 'You seemed very certain of that.'
'Nyx unloaded it while we were arguing,' he said. 'If you want to keep up, you'll need to start paying attention. — Kameron Hurley

Your voice is powerful. Your voice has meaning. If it didn't, people wouldn't work so hard to silence you.
Remember that. — Kameron Hurley

The world is full of people who write poorly but passionately, and others who can put a sentence together but have no feeling behind it. All they have in common is that they don't give up when people say they're talentless hacks. And both of those types of writers have audiences. — Kameron Hurley

Nyx did what she always did after she shot a terrorist or garrotted a deserter. She carried on. — Kameron Hurley

Let's be real: if women were "naturally" anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives — Kameron Hurley

Someone had to fight the monsters. Who better than a monster? — Kameron Hurley

When I was sixteen, I wrote an essay about why women should remain barred from combat in the U.S. military. I found it recently while going through some old papers. My argument for why women shouldn't be in combat was because war was terrible, and families were important, and with all these men dying in war, why would we want women to die, too?
That was my entire argument.
"Women shouldn't go to war because, like men do now, they would die there."
I got an "A. — Kameron Hurley

Just keep in mind," Liaro said, "they're not going to remember the words. They'll remember how you made them feel. Make them feel something. — Kameron Hurley

The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that writing novels shouldn't feel like a job. — Kameron Hurley

We finally got around to processing the Queen's request to reinstate your bel dame status," Fatima said.
"What, twelve years later?"
"Bel dames are not known for the efficiency of their paper pushing. — Kameron Hurley

Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what's underneath — Kameron Hurley

You're scaring the help," Rhys said. He watched her now with his dark eyes.
"I scare a lot of people," Nyx said. — Kameron Hurley

Bel dames spent most of their time running after criminals in dingy, unfiltered cities, making enemies with other bel dames whose notes they stole, girlfriends they fucked, and sons they killed. — Kameron Hurley

If it wasn't the Tai Mora, who would we fight? Ourselves? The Dhai? The Dorinah? Always another face, always the same face. — Kameron Hurley

The women in my family were hardworking matriarchs. But the stories I saw on TV and movies and even in many books said they were anomalies — Kameron Hurley

She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She'd never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women. — Kameron Hurley

Take me there. Or is this a kidnapping? Don't confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued. — Kameron Hurley

I remember throwing away a child. — Kameron Hurley

His militia escorted her up four painful flights of stairs to a great foyer, apologizing the whole way for not considering how difficult stairs would be for her. What they really meant, of course, was that they felt silly and impatient because her pace was so much slower than theirs. — Kameron Hurley

What folks don't realize, I think, is that very often "good" just means "competent." I — Kameron Hurley

I'm afraid," I say, and that is partly the truth. I am afraid of what I am going to have to do to this person who claims she is my sister, but who I want to take into my arms and fuck until the world ends. — Kameron Hurley

She wanted to build a better world. So why did so many others want to keep it just the same? — Kameron Hurley

You started caring about somebody, you did stupid things. — Kameron Hurley

The dagger strapped to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles. — Kameron Hurley

At the end of the world, the war was going to come down to throwing stones. — Kameron Hurley

Ahmed turned, and leaned into him. Kissed him on the mouth again.
"I'm pretty fucked up," Eshe said.
"It's a good thing I'm perfect, then. — Kameron Hurley

The secret to leadership is not to be a particularly intelligent person. It is to surround oneself with those far smarter than oneself. And try not to kill them. — Kameron Hurley

You need to change the whole system to be free, not just improve your part in it. — Kameron Hurley

Her body sometimes amazed her. She could keep going long after she couldn't. — Kameron Hurley

The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless. — Kameron Hurley

The wonderful thing about being ignorant is that it can be resolved very easily. Foolishness cannot. — Kameron Hurley

We aren't going to win," Roh said. "No," Luna said, "but we're going to live. — Kameron Hurley

Ras Tiegans fried everything, from grasshoppers to pickles to hunks of curried dog. — Kameron Hurley

How are you feeling?"
"Fit as a harem girl."
"You're as much a harem girl as I am a mullah," Suha said. — Kameron Hurley

What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? ... Stories tell us who we are. What we're capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what's important. — Kameron Hurley

She is equal parts manic brutality and strategic fuckery. — Kameron Hurley

And some of us believe in freedom of the individual over the tyranny of the common good. — Kameron Hurley

When you understand what the world is, you have two choices: Become a part of that world and perpetuate that system forever and ever, unto the next generation. Or fight it, and break it, and build something new. The former is safer, and easier. The latter is scarier, because who is to say what you build will be any better? — Kameron Hurley

Nyx rubbed the ointment onto her new, darker skin. She was nearly as dark as Suha now. She supposed it would protect her from more cancers, but it was funny-looking. At least her face was the same. At least her face didn't look Chenjan.
I'm never going to get laid again, Nyx thought. — Kameron Hurley

There was a fine line between madness and intelligence. — Kameron Hurley

Systems of racism and sexism and oppression are not systems we choose, but they are ones we inherit and are responsible for perpetuating, or not. When I hear so-and-so was "a product of his/her time" as an excuse for bigoted behavior, I remind folks that there have always been people in every time who did not agree with the bigoted systems they were born into and who actively fought them. The question is, which are we? — Kameron Hurley

The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)?
But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity — J. Kameron Carter

All you do is learn how to fight a war," Nyx said. "Nobody ever teaches you how to stop. — Kameron Hurley

So long as the people with the power - to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket - look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia or any other -sim they've learned form stories, videos, media and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone. — Kameron Hurley

She had traded that first womb for twenty notes and a case of Ras Tiegan beer. — Kameron Hurley

I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women's History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.
Half the world is full of women, but it's rare to hear a narrative that doesn't speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man's daughter. A man's wife. — Kameron Hurley

We can pretend all we like that women are equal, ut as long as men and women are continually encouraged to supress the broad aspects of their humanity that we decry as "feminine", we're all screwed.
Because it's those things qe celebrate as "other" that make us truly human. It's what we label "soft" or "feminune" that makes civilization possible, It's our empathy, our ability to care and nurtureand connect. It's our ability to come together. To buld. To remake. Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to supress ther "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy. — Kameron Hurley

Life was what you did with what was done to you. — Kameron Hurley

What were all of them, really, but bits of something else? Bits of stars? — Kameron Hurley

How many men had made her? Her brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine's half-breed muscle? They were just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hoards of sistesr, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or none of them. It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you.
"You didn't make me," Nyx gasped. "I made myself. — Kameron Hurley

All you have to decide, as they say, is what you do with the time given. — Kameron Hurley

Human beings are, if nothing else, dedicated to upholding their narrative of the way the world is supposed to be, whether or not that world ever truly existed. — Kameron Hurley

The monsters don't live in the belly of the world like they all say. The monsters live inside of us. We make the monsters. — Kameron Hurley

It was men, not God, who had done those things... — Kameron Hurley

The motto above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the prayer language: My life for a thousand.

She remembered swearing an oath with that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen. My life for a thousand. — Kameron Hurley

I love birds. I love to cage them, you see, because when you first do it, they fight so terribly hard. They are so alive, so defiant. I measure how long it takes for them to lose their spirit. To stop fighting. To resign themselves to their fate ... They all give up, eventually. They are all in a cage, you see. There is no way out. — Kameron Hurley

Nyx had to admit she had a soft spot for plain folks. There was something to be said for finding beauty in the rough. — Kameron Hurley

We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing. — Kameron Hurley

I'm not trying to be mean,' Casamir says.
'Intent doesn't always matter. — Kameron Hurley

But I find soldiering false, a broken way to manage people who should be bound to you in love, not fear. — Kameron Hurley

I've bled and fucked and died for this country, Nyx said. — Kameron Hurley

The war had remade her. Reshaped her purpose. Why couldn't she unmake it again? — Kameron Hurley

Aliens bled red, just like everybody else. — Kameron Hurley

So what the hell's wrong with me?" Nyx eased off the marble slab.
"Besides your deviant moral flexibility and severe phobia of emotional commitment?" Yahfia asked.
"I consider those virtues," Nyx said. — Kameron Hurley

There is nothing I fear more than someone without memory. A person without memory is free to do anything she likes. — Kameron Hurley

Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to suppress their "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.
What makes us human is not one or the other - the fist or the open palm - it's our ability to embrace both, and choose the appropriate action for the situation we're in. Because to deny one half - to burn down the world or refuse to defend the world from those who would burn it - is to deny our humanity and become something less than human. — Kameron Hurley

We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying," Nyx said. "Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich. — Kameron Hurley

I thought you loved all this excitement,' Nyx said.
'I love orange-flavored popsicles. Fried maggots on toast. Sunset in Ashura. This? This, I merely tolerate. — Kameron Hurley

( ... ) then went into his room in the middle of the night after a long, heavy day of footwork and drinking; a coward's fight. She'd trussed him up and cut off his cock. She considered the act her formal resignation. — Kameron Hurley