Top 80 Rivers Solomon Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating.”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Wife, I require supper. I am hungry, as the mental effort required to digest politics is quite taxing. You would not understand.”

— Rivers Solomon

26. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

29. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

31. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.”

— Rivers Solomon

36. “We got a saying here in Tide Wing: Should is for weaklings.”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

38. “Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that’s so clearly not true.”

— Rivers Solomon

39. “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

40. “They say there’s nothing like watching a child’s face light up as they learn something new, but the folks who say that is lying. Children are fine enough, just not my favorite.”

— Rivers Solomon

41. “You Lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.”

— Rivers Solomon

42. “I’m not the maternal type. Lullabies bore me. The idea of a child hanging off my breast, using me for sustenance, makes me very angry for some reason. Probably because I am always angry about everything. I am like a gramophone and the volume’s too loud, and you can’t find the off button, and all you can do is cover your ears until the end of the record.”

— Rivers Solomon

43. “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

44. “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

45. “She didn’t need much. Didn’t need to be adored and loved and called nice things. All she wished for was perfunctory respect paid to the fact that she was, indeed, alive. Real, breathing, thinking, movable parts and all.”

— Rivers Solomon

46. “I am the only one who gets to decide what is in my best interest. Not you, Theo. The fact that you have been given arbitrary power over me does not mean that you should exert that power when it suits you.”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

49. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon