The Sea Knows My Name Quotes

“I set off again and again with my bag full of empty notebooks and Clementine’s knife on my hip. I wear holes in my boots. I fill pages. When I visit a place, I ask for its science, and I ask for its stories. I listen.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“I will never be a mythical hero—not Thea, not Asterope, not Melia—but I’m me, I’m a real person, and isn’t that better? I can fail and grow and change.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“This, I realize, was Asterope’s revenge: Knowing the world can be cold and cruel, and choosing to love someone anyway. Knowing the world did not believe you, but hoping it believes your daughter.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“Asterope never gets to defeat her villain. She never gets to avenge the man who cursed her, or break her curse, or even prove to the people of her kingdom that she never lied about the king. She doesn’t get to go back to her family. She never gets to walk on dry land again.

But Asterope gets to survive.

Someone hears, listens to, believes Asterope.

Someone loves Asterope.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“Oh. Oh, I wanted to say something, wanted to talk to her, wanted to ask her why and how. Could she see? How awed I was? I’d seen plenty of whales from Asterope’s deck, but none so close—none that looked me in the eye. The gods had always been myths to me, just stories, but this felt like apotheosis. Like meeting a god.

This animal. This intelligent, compassionate, human creature. Why is it that we judge an animal’s intellect by how much emotion they show, but we judge humans by how much emotion they repress?”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“No one was going to stop me. But it scared me more to turn back than to keep going.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“I’ve never believed in gods and I’ve never had anyone to pray to, but right now, I wish I believed.

My mother named me after you. Help me. Help me.

In the stories, the goddess Thea says that all of man’s weakness comes from two places: love and fear. From love and fear come every other emotion. When a hero comes to Thea for guidance, she presses her thumbs to his temples and takes away his love and fear. She takes away his weakness.

I press my thumbs to my temples. I imagine what it would feel like to rid myself of love and to rid myself of fear.

What is it you want, Thea? Wes asked me.

This is what I want: I want to run a scalpel through my skull, temple to temple, and free myself of love and fear.

I don’t know which of the two—love or fear—is telling me I can’t let Clementine die. I love her. I fear her. I want to love myself. And I am afraid of who I am without her.

If the goddess Thea were here to take my love and fear, I’d turn away from Clementine and never look back. But she’s not. Love and fear fill me. Maybe they make me weak; fine. This will be my last act of weakness. I’ll save Clementine, and in so doing, I will ruin the future I’ve started to build here. Ruin any forgiveness Wes has started to give me. I will do this one, final, weak thing, and then I’ll have nothing left to hold me back. Then, for the rest of my life, Clementine and I can be strong.

Like equals.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“Don’t pretend you know who Clementine is. Don’t pretend you know who I am. Clementine is a survivor. She takes care of herself. I take care of myself.” For all my fights with Clementine, that’s always what she’s wanted for me. Not for me to become a pirate. Not for me to become a killer.

She wanted me to be a survivor.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“The birth doesn’t make me want to wax poetic. Maybe this was supposed to be a turning point for me, wherein I saw the power of the female body and the bonds of motherhood and daughterhood that link us all.

But I still thought it was pretty disgusting.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“The myth of Libera says this is supposed to be awful, childbirth, and maybe that’s why we don’t work harder to fix it. The myth of Libera says that women are cruel to each other and women deserve what they get, that Thea betrayed her sister and look how much pain it caused.

But I’m a Thea too, and I’m not going anywhere.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“The myth of Libera says this is supposed to be awful, childbirth, and maybe that’s why we don’t work harder to fix it. The myth of Libera says that women are cruel to each other and women deserve what they get, that Thea betrayed her sister and look how much pain it caused. But I’m a Thea too, and I’m not going anywhere.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“So women must turn their anger on each other because there’s no one else to hold accountable. No one else who might listen. No one else who might hear a woman’s roar and think it powerful. And when a woman—out of charity, exhaustion, or some hard-won insight—realizes the futility of tearing down the women around her, she has only one place to funnel the seething, smoking, acrid pool of rage that has been building since she was a child: back on herself.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name

“It’s too good. It can’t hold. The better things get, the more convinced I am that they will come crashing down spectacularly. The more I let myself hope that this is a real future, a real life, the farther I’ll fall. I don’t know if I can survive a fall from this height.”
― Laura Brooke Robson, The Sea Knows My Name