Best 51 quotes of Kameron Hurley on MyQuotes

It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.

Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.

We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.

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.

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.

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

And there is good money to be made when things are bad.

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.

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

Everything hurt. It meant she was alive.

Every time Nyx thought she’d gotten out of the business of killing boys, she shot another one.

Funny isn't it? The power of story. It's why I picked up a pen. I slay monsters, too.

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.

He wore a white girdle that pulled in his waist just above the hips. He was, of necessity, slender. She believed men should take up as little space as possible. He wore his black hair long over his shoulders, tied once with a white ribbon. The men allowed to live were, of course, beautiful, far more beautiful than any of the women Zezili knew. Anavha was clean-shaven, as she wanted him, lightly powdered in gold, his eyes lined in kohl, eyes a stormy grey, set a bit too wide in a broad face whose jaw she has initially found almost vulgar in its squareness. He stood a hand shorter than she; she easily outweighed him by fifty pounds. She liked him just this way.

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.

I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them. We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.

I'd internalized an astonishing amount of misogyny growing up that I didn't even recognize until my early twenties.

I dream of a woman with a great craven face walking along the surface of a massive world. She is a titan. She snatches flying vehicles from the air and crunches them in her diamond teeth. Green lubricant and yellow puffs of exhaust escape her gaping mouth. Little blue insects flitter through the ether, and when they encounter the yellow mist, they fall down dead, like leaves. The surface of the world is covered in wavering tentacles, and the titan grabs on to them for purchase as she strides across the world, snarling and spitting out the corpses of her enemies and poisoning everything she breathes on. She snatches at one of the flying vehicles and stabs herself in the stomach with it. She cuts long and low, and though I expect her to cry out in pain, she only roars and shows her teeth as gouts of blood pour from her body and float lazily to the surface of the world, sluggish and distorted by the low gravity.

If you think there’s a thing—anything—women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.

I have spent my life battling monsters. It was only in realizing that I was the monster, and choosing to destroy her, that I could save the world.

I have wanted to hate her all my life, but as I've learned since my early days pining after Rasida, I am drawn to and desire my enemies, and it may be my worst flaw.

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

independence is one of the greatest delusions of youth

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.

I spent a great deal of my ilfe trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was misereable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap without dissent. But nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off, I'm only really alive when I'm pissing people off anyway

It all came apart once you started caring for something outside yourself.

I was limited by stories that came before mine. We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?

Men did not like women to weep. It reminded them of their own failings.

Most people who watch a fight think it's all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.

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.

Nyx was a lot of things, but forgettable wasn't one of them.

On reflection, looking at shows like this and considering my own experiences, what fascinated me was that we have so many stories like this that help us empathize with monstrous men. “Yes, these men are flawed, but they are not as evil as this man.” Even more chilling, they tend to be stories that paint women as roadblocks, aggressors, antagonists, complications—but only in the context of them being a bitch, a whore, a Madonna. The women are never people. Stories about monstrous men are not meant to teach us how to empathize with the women and children murdered, but with the men fighting over their bodies. As a woman menaced by monsters, I find this particularly interesting, this erasure of me from a narrative meant to, if not justify, then explain the brokenness of men. There are shows much better at this, of course, which don’t paint women out of the story—Mad Men is the first to come to mind, and Game of Thrones—but True Detective doubled down. The women terrorized by monsters in real life are active agents. They are monster-slayers, monster-pacifiers, monster-nurturers, monster-wranglers—and some of them are monsters, too. In truth, if we are telling a tale of those who fight monsters, it fascinates me that we are not telling more women’s stories, as we’ve spun so many narratives like True Detective that so blatantly illustrate the sexist masculinity trap that turns so many human men into the very things they despise. Where are the women who fight them? Who partner with them? Who overcome them? Who battle their own monsters to fight greater ones? Because I have and continue to be one of those women, navigating a horror show world of monsters and madmen. We are women who write books and win awards and fight battles and carve out extraordinary lives from ruin and ash. We are not background scenery, our voices silenced, our motives and methods constrained to sex. I cannot fault the show’s men for forgetting that; they’ve created the world as they see it. But I can prod the show’s exceptional writers, because in erasing the narrative of those whose very existence is constantly threatened by these monsters, including trusted monsters whose natures vacillate wildly, they sided with the monsters. I’m not a bit player in a monster’s story. But with narratives like this perpetuated across our media, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how my obituary read: a catalogue of the men who sired me, and fucked me, and courted me. Stories that are not my own. Funny, isn’t it? The power of story. It’s why I picked up a pen. I slay monsters, too.

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

Storytelling instead of info dumping is a fairly well-known life hack, but there are still very few people who tell stories instead of facts.

That was a very formidable woman," Caisa said. "I seem to know a good many of those." "And you have a terrible habit of angering them," she said.

There is no place for you in this new world," Fatima said. "That's what I'm hoping," said Nyx. "If you had any goddamn sense, you'd hope so too.

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

There was a fine line between madness and intelligence.

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.

The wall? What’s the wall?” Nyx asked. The woman told him. Ahmed translated, “The end of the world.” “Well, that’s fitting,” Nyx said. “It does sound promising,” Ahmed said.

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.

War makes monsters of us all. But what happens to those of us who no longer wish to be monsters?

We all create the stories we need to survive

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

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.

We worship the same God and we carry the same sins.

You going to fuck her or kill her?” Anneke asked when Nyx sent Mercia off with her bodyguards. “You never look that close unless it’s one or the other.

You have War of the Worlds?" I asked the knu. It returned twenty different films, sixteen editions of a text, but no radio play. Radio drama. That's the word Tanaka had used. One text said it was history, and included a transcript. "Read it to me," I said, and the knu picked up the soothing default voice I had programmed into my heads-up, and told me a story about how little towns went crazy thinking the Martians were invading, back during the days of peak capitalism. What makes people believe this shit? I thought as I lay there listening. But it was easy, wasn't it, when people were isolated. When information was scarce or siloed. People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world. Bad Martians. Logical, well-meaning corporations.

Young white men in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range are often coming to grips with the fact that life isn't as easy as they were promised. I've been there myself. When you realize that life isn't going to hand you the job you want or the woman you want to fuck, you look around for someone to blame, and feminism becomes an easy target. If only women were subservient objects who stayed at home, there would be more jobs open to young white men and more women with no other option but to have sex with them for sustenance. I realize that white-man utopia sounds really pleasing to these guys, but it's basically everyone else's worst nightmare It's not so great for them either, but they won't get that for a long time, if ever. Suffice to say you won't convince them of this in an online comments section, either.

You started caring about somebody, you did stupid things.