Top 90 Rivers Solomon Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I’m not maternal but that doesn’t mean I don’t love. I love Aster. I love all the girls and women I look after. It is hard to be in somebody’s presence for so long and not develop something like love.”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

53. “When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton.”

— Rivers Solomon

54. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

56. “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

57. “I don’t have time to nurse an acquaintance,” she continued, “especially not one as old as ours. An acquaintance this old that has never bloomed into friendship never will, and it’s hardly worth the upkeep and maintenance required.”

— Rivers Solomon

58. “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

59. “Dear Sirs,” Flick began before loudly inhaling, “On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts – Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She’s healed up now so you don’t have to worry about it happening again.”

— Rivers Solomon

60. “How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.”

— Rivers Solomon

61. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

64. “And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.”

— Rivers Solomon

65. “It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different.”

— Rivers Solomon

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

70. “Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone.”

— Rivers Solomon

71. “Defiance would always be Vern’s purest and most plentiful resource.”

— Rivers Solomon

72. “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

73. “Are you now so deluded you think you exist outside the category of everything?”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

76. “We are the descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.”

— Rivers Solomon

77. “Living without detail long-term memories allowed for spontaneity and lack of regret, but after a certain amount of time had passed, they needed more.”

— Rivers Solomon

78. “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

79. “Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?”

— Rivers Solomon

80. “How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?”

— Rivers Solomon

81. “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

82. “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

83. “The forest didn’t mind illiterates and mad girls. Didn’t mind that screaming was sometimes a person’s only language.”

— Rivers Solomon

84. “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

85. “Aster pulled her feet up onto the stool she was sitting on so that her whole body was scrunched into a ball. “I see,” she said. She’d thought she’d trained her mind out of its predisposition toward excessive literalism, but there it was, persistent as ever, making a fool of her.”

— Rivers Solomon

86. “It was strange to be having such a conversation with her Amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the history. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead. Goodness, how’d did she missed it?”

— Rivers Solomon

87. “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

88. “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

89. “Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.”

— Rivers Solomon

90. “There was no talking Ollie and her ilk into believing Vern and her ilk were actually people. They were collateral damage in a useless battle waged to attain more power.”

— Rivers Solomon

91. “The constant terror of our home turned Eve into a machine of efficiency, me, a person detached from their body, and Emmanuelle neurotic.”

— Rivers Solomon

92. “Mother. Mother. I promise I am learning. I am learning not to eat. I am learning to become a sliver.”

— Rivers Solomon

93. “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

94. “I can’t tell the difference between grief and ghosts. Both seize the body and take what they will.”

— Rivers Solomon

95. “I had a sister named Inertia,“said Metusine. “Died. Ill from the day she was born. Mother thought if she named her that it would keep her alive. Keep her in motion.”

— Rivers Solomon

96. “To everyone I will ever be, and ever was.”

— Rivers Solomon