The Salt Roads Quotes

“How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle. ”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Do not ask your future, or you will forget to live in your present.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“I wanted to believe that Makandal flew away, but my wishes can’t fly freely so. They’re rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Mister Pierre was finally looking at the baby’s body. “A boy? Why aren’t you two lackwits seeing to my child?” There had been women’s voices in this room all these long hours. Mister Pierre’s booming was like sudden thunder during a soft rain.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

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

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

“People talk but do nothing,” the Ginen people said. “Papa God doesn’t talk, but he does plenty.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“I had put on beauty as a hermit crab puts on a discarded shell.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“I remembered to keep my body inclined low, to shrink myself smaller than he. He was sensitive about my greater height.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“The sea in the minds of my Ginen. The sea roads, the salt roads. And the sweet ones, too; the rivers. Can’t follow them to their sources any more. I land up in the same foul, stagnant swamp every time. You must fix it, Mer.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Whore” I do not understand yet, but I understand from her that her and her kin are your spices, your honey scent; she knows that you and your class have made them so. Wherefore then is she bitter? Do you find her so bitter then, Charles? What do you say, O man of words?”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads