Rivers Solomon > Quotes

“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered. Aster sat up, and Theo helped her prop two pillows beneath her head. “Is that so? Then I am magic. I say it, therefore it is true,” she said.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“You say madness such as mine doesn’t exist, but it would exist in you, too, if you had to experience the ugly things I do all the time,” she said,”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“You Lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“You're one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“You are an anomaly of a man," she said.

"Perhaps because I'm not a man at all." He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her.

"Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling," she said..."Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?"

"I think it doesn't matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not," he answered.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only t be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I'm a lover of stories even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don't want to be scrutable.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude. Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Where history saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“I like the woods,” she said. “In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn’t matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms. It turns sorrows into flowers.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“There'd be no forgiveness this time. It was one thing to destroy a person, but to destroy their work was a sacrilege Aster couldn't easily forget. All that was left of a person's life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Aster didn't mean it. As much as it frustrated her, she understood the logic of Giselle's psychosis. Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There's no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise. (63)”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“The audiobook that you are currently listening to and are likely upset that you listened to too quickly. Were you at double speed? I know you were.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“When you're everyone in the past and when you're for everyone in the present, you're no one. Nobody. You don't exist. I didn't exist.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that's so clearly not true.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home