Top 90 Rivers Solomon Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.”

— Rivers Solomon

52. “This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.”

— Rivers Solomon

53. “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

54. “Everything burns up some time or another, even God Herself. That’s how She made the Heavens. She a phoenix. Like me.”

— Rivers Solomon

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

60. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

68. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

78. “If I cannot forget, what is there? I am always remembering, even when I am not. Me is in itself a remembrance. Me does not exist without the past that shaped my being. And what is there between memory and forgetting? Today?”

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

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

— Rivers Solomon

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

90. “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

91. “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

92. “The realization, that validation of the pain will never come from those who inflicted the pain has the power to obliterate. Did it happen? If they are not apologizing, if they are not admitting they have done it, did they do it? What is real? What is true? Is my life a fantasy? Then let me wake up by dying.”

— Rivers Solomon

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Rivers Solomon

96. “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