"The Fifth Season"

So rare to read a sci-fi book based on geology. The rest, including the gender-bending and the description of systematic enslavement, is laudable but not as eye-opening.
N.K. Jemisin has been on my radar for a long time, and I tried this book a while ago but couldn't get past the description of the brutal killing of the protagonist's young son. This time I stuck it out, and am glad of it. The narrator Robin Miles's voice grew on me too.

• Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve.
• After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me, and you.
• Neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope.
• “You must remember, though, that most normal people have never seen an orogene, let alone had to do business with one, and—” She spreads her hands. “Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?” “Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.” Rust this. This woman doesn’t deserve the effort of her explanation. Syen decides to save that for someone who matters. “And that’s a really shitty apology. ‘I’m sorry you’re so abnormal that I can’t manage to treat you like a human being.”
• There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive.
• The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it’s all the same thing.
• Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.
• You’ve read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.
• Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.
• This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.
• And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child.
• Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.
• no one has ever built them before in written history. (But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.)
• You’re a gift of the earth—but Father Earth hates us, never forget, and his gifts are neither free nor safe.
• Likewise, no one speaks of celestial objects, though the skies are as crowded and busy here as anywhere else in the universe. This is largely because so much of the people’s attention is directed toward the ground, not the sky. They notice what’s there: stars and the sun and the occasional comet or falling star. They do not notice what’s missing. But then, how can they? Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined? That would not be human nature. How fortunate, then, that there are more people in this world than just humankind.
• ...it’s like tasting a page of a book and noticing the minute differences between the ink and the bare page and using that to read.
• It’s a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to something else. The pebble in the stream, the warp in the weft; countless aeons ago a bubble formed in a flow of molten mineral within Father Earth. Within that pocket, nurtured by incomprehensible pressures and bathed in water and fire, crystals grew. This one’s the size of a city. Which is probably why someone built a city in this one. You stand before a vast, vaulted cavern that is full of glowing crystal shafts the size of tree trunks. Big tree trunks. Or buildings. Big buildings. They jut forth from the walls in an utterly haphazard jumble: different lengths, different circumferences, some white and translucent and a few smoky or tinged with purple. Some are stubby, their pointed tips ending only a few feet away from the walls that grew them—but many stretch from one side of the vast cavern into the indistinct distance. They form struts and roads too steep to climb, going in directions that make no sense. It is as if someone found an architect, made her build a city out of the most beautiful materials available, then threw all those buildings into a box and jumbled them up for laughs.
• Someday, you must tell me what it's like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent... and so very afraid.