Al > Al's Quotes

“Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“What’s your point?” “The changes.” I thought for a moment. “They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I still don’t believe you,” she said. “Things don’t have to be as bad as you say they are.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you’ll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down.” “Look down … ?” “Into the abyss, Daughter.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“But then, I have no memory of most of my childhood. Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“You keep thinking there’s a reason for everything, ’cause you can figure some out. There ain’t. All the bad that’s happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them. You can’t blame yourself. It’s sad, so very sad, and maybe if I were a different woman I’d weep like a little baby. Maybe I want to weep. Maybe if I wept people would feel sorry for me and do nice things for me.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“TV spun a web of dreams. Vern was happy to be caught in it. She could get drunk on this place where police were good, always solving crimes and caring about folks, and everyone was so shiny and pretty.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“I prefer winkte, but when I’m talking to non-Natives, yeah, I’m a gay girl.” “Winkte?” “It’s a Lakota thing,” said Gogo. “Lakota for gay?”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“You sure do pretend you’re a philistine, for someone with a mind sharp enough to cut the world in half,”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Darkness was Vern’s country. It was all she had by way of a homeland. It pleased her to think it could be a place that nourished. Everyone was always going on about light this and light that, but what of dark?”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Didn’t mind that screaming was sometimes a person’s only language.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Defiance would always be Vern’s purest and most plentiful resource.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Gogo always snorted at native soil. Rich words from a colonizer, she said.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“The two of them were close enough that Vern could examine her properly, lick up the little details of her. She savored these intricacies in people, always had: the way the clock face of her brother Carmichael’s watch never faced up, the band too big on his thin wrist despite being set to the tightest notch. Lucy’s dark sideburns, the little beads of hair like black pearls. Mam’s gospel humming, ever so quiet, so as not to be heard until you were right up close. Even a few feet away, Vern would always have to strain to catch the notes, the words. Gogo smelled mostly of shampoo, something generic and clean. Rainfall or Spring Zest or Mountain Air.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“...she was letting the crisis invigorate her. She was like Vern in that way, more at home in conflict than in peace. Tragedy sharpened you. It was the quickest way to turn yourself into an edge.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“She and Vern both were … not touch-starved, precisely, but used to a particular type of emotional isolation that came after years of convincing yourself it was all right, better even, to be alone. As a defense mechanism, such self-delusion had its place, but once the farce faded, it was like your whole body transformed all its years of misbelieving into insatiable hunger for contact.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“You never know what Legbara going to take it into he head to do. Him is a trickster. The Eshu-them too love to play games.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

“Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

“You want to be what you are. That’s healthy and right for you. What we do about it is our decision, our responsibility. Not yours.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Imago

“ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.”
― Rivers Solomon, Blood Is Another Word for Hunger

“The etherworld, always one eye steady on the realm of humankind, took note. Disturbances in the order of things could be exploited, could cut paths between dominions.”
― Rivers Solomon, Blood Is Another Word for Hunger

“Bad-minded man, always making mischief, spreading doubt and fear.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Blue stars crackled, spat. “Why they don’t speak to me!”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Everyone denied the existence of the apocalyptic disease. It was gaslighting on a broad scale.”
― Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void

“I had managed to live this long not knowing any Russians, not really, and yet now my life was crawling with them, like I was an election they wanted to hack.”
― Mike Lupica, Robert B. Parker's Payback

“Red everywhere on Waze, as if the city were bleeding.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Serpentine

“Appeasing the architects of the war”
― Ausma Zehanat Khan, The Unquiet Dead

“You can die merging onto the freeway. You can choke on your take-out salad.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Half Moon Bay