Top 80 Rivers Solomon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

— Rivers Solomon

3. “We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. 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. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.”

— Rivers Solomon

4. “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

— Rivers Solomon

5. “We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

— Rivers Solomon

6. “What does it matter where any place is unless you are trying to return to it? It’d do you well not to think of here at all. You’re trying to find yourself, aren’t you? To do that, you must go. Thinking of this place will only hold you back.”

— Rivers Solomon

7. “In my language, there is no word for I. To even come close, you must say, E’tesh’lem vereme pri’lus, which means, This one here who is apart from all. It’s the way we say lonely and alone. It’s the way we say outsider. It’s the way we say weak. Everyone always wonders about I love you. In Ifrek you say, Mev o’tem, or, We are together. “How do you say, I’m tired?” people ask. “Ek’erb nal veesh ly. The time for rest is upon us.”

— Rivers Solomon

8. “There were worse things than being a motherless child. Without a past, Aster was boundless. She could metamorphose. She could be a shiny, magnificent version of herself.”

— Rivers Solomon

9. “People watched others commit atrocities all the time. Seeing didn’t transform into doing.”

— Rivers Solomon

10. “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

11. “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

12. “That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

— Rivers Solomon

13. “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

14. “It was summer, and the world was as bright as a lightning flash. Blue sky. Red dirt. Everything was set alight. Vern tried to cherish it, to turn toward the sun the way bluebells did, but Vern still lusted after the dark of the woods, where she was born, where her true self had been made.”

— Rivers Solomon

15. “Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?”

— Rivers Solomon

16. “Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.”

— Rivers Solomon

17. “I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.”

— Rivers Solomon

18. “Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”

— Rivers Solomon

19. “She’s more delicate than you’d think,” I say. She’s glass. I’m glass. We’re all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments. It’s a circus act.”

— Rivers Solomon

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.”

— Rivers Solomon

24. “The Remembrance took more than it gave. It required she remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once. Not just that, she had to put order and meaning to the events, so that the others could understand. She had to help them open their minds so they could relive the past too. It was a painful process.”

— Rivers Solomon

25. “She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams.”

— Rivers Solomon

26. “The rememberings carried her mind away from the ocean to the past. These days, she was more there than here.”

— Rivers Solomon

27. “I don’t know why, but I’m not thankful. I’m never thankful. I want to be, I do, but all I feel is this annoyance that won’t stop. Every nice thing that anyone could ever think to do to me leaves me feeling enraged. It’s like, too little too late, buddy.”

— Rivers Solomon

28. “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

29. “I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.”

— Rivers Solomon

30. “No podemos entender a un pueblo que ha elegido por voluntad propia aislarse de su historia, por mucho dolor que imponga.”

— Rivers Solomon

31. “We wait to be numbed by it, for the grief to become so much that we no longer feel it. That point never arrives. Our numbers reduce, and the rage grows.”

— Rivers Solomon

32. “Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?”

— Rivers Solomon

33. “What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?”

— Rivers Solomon

34. “People believed whatever they needed to, to maintain a thread of power in a society that systematically stripped them of it.”

— Rivers Solomon

35. “Better not to belong at all than belong in a cage.”

— Rivers Solomon

36. “In the woods, where animals ruled with teeth and claws, such things mattered not a lick.”

— Rivers Solomon

37. “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

38. “People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.”

— Rivers Solomon

39. “My child,” Amaba said, frightened. “What sickness is this? What madness would cause one to put oneself in fatal harm purposely, knowingly? Surely, it cannot exist.”

— Rivers Solomon

40. “She reached into one of the cabinets and got out an old box filled with amber vials of isopropyl alcohol. Expensive. Hard to find. She emptied them out one by one over herself, even over her shorn hair, until she smelled like medicine. Until she was a sterile thing no more sexual than a pair of sanitized scissors. That sharp too.”

— Rivers Solomon

41. “Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious.”

— Rivers Solomon

42. “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

43. “There was an excitement coming from Giselle. She was standing on the edge of a new world and so ready to jump. How Lucifer felt upon leaving Heaven. He didn’t fall. He dove.”

— Rivers Solomon

44. “With history, with memory, with retellings, people often settled for the obvious answer.”

— Rivers Solomon

45. “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

46. “She was a girl made of aches and she flung her body at the world in the hopes that something, anything, might soothe the tendernesses.”

— Rivers Solomon

47. “Running had become her favorite mode of transport. She lived for that brief snap of true flight, both feet in the air at once. Jumping down a half-flight of stairs then catapulting down another. Aerial Aster. Sky Master Aster! Barely Avoiding Disaster Aster! There was less time lost in transport when she ran as fast as she could, no care for her own safety.”

— Rivers Solomon

48. “Words mattered now, in the moment. They spoiled quickly when held inside, and what did they mean when offered too late but nothing at all?”

— Rivers Solomon

49. “You’re a smart one. You know as good as me and as Flick that there is no Promised Land. Matilda’s an orphan, a daughter of dead gods. But Ancestors is real and their spirits are at work. Baby sun giving out is how they making a fuss.”

— Rivers Solomon

50. “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