Kameron Hurley > Quotes

“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 Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays

“Life was what you did with what was done to you.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“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, The Stars Are Legion

“Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what's underneath”
― Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion

“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 Geek Feminist Revolution

“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, God's War

“People do not take actions based on logic. We make choices based on emotion. Every one of us. Then we use what we call logic to justify our choices.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

“Humanity is a monster you can never kill.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“Take me there. Or is this a kidnapping? Don't confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“This is something we don’t talk about . . . what happens when you are presented with a truth that contradicts everything you believe in? The widespread proliferation of information in the early days of the open knu, back when it was the wild net, should have made truth easier to find. But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“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, The Geek Feminist Revolution

“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

“People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“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, The Stars Are Legion

“If you think there’s a thing—anything—women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution

“Your haters are not here for a conversation. They are here to keep you from doing your work.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution

“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, The Geek Feminist Revolution

“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 Mirror Empire

“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, Infidel

“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, The Geek Feminist Revolution

“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.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“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, The Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays

“Nobody knows anybody. We’re all working on blind faith.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“Nyx was a lot of things, but forgettable wasn't one of them.”
― Kameron Hurley, Infidel

“The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless.”
― Kameron Hurley, Infidel

“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, The Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays

“Send a monster to kill a monster.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“What is love anyway but a hunger no meal can satisfy?”
― Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion

“All you have to decide, as they say, is what you do with the time given.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays