The Prophets Quotes

“There are no lines. For everything is a circle, turning back on itself endlessly. This is not to make you dizzy, but to give you the chance to get it right the next time.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“When they approached, she had figured out something that had been like a splinter in her foot: the easy thing to believe was that toubab were monsters, their crimes exceptional. Harder, however, and even more frightening was the truth: there was no such thing as monsters. Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Knowledge was a strength even when it hurt.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Our responsibility is to tell you the truth. But since you were never told the truth, you will believe it a lie. Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Yet he was so proud. People liked pride. Mistook it for purpose.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“There was no one else in the world, she thought, cursed to carry such a burden. Everywhere a girl existed, there was someone telling her that she was her own fault and leading a ritual to punish her for something she never did.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“I ask them, the old dark voices, about you. They say you right proud. On your way to becoming a man yourself. Got a lot of your people in you, but don’t know it yet. And quick, maybe too quick for your own good. I surprised you still living. I ask them, I say, “Can you take a message to him? Tell him I remember every curl on his head and every fold on his body down to the creases between his toes. Tell him not even the whip can remedy that.” They don’t answer, but they say you down in Mississippi now, where whole things is made half. Why they tell me that, I don’t know. What mother wanna hear her child finna be carved up and carved out for no reason at all? I guess it don’t matter. Here or there, us all gone be made to pay somehow.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“But he did think about the ways in which his body wasn’t his own and how that condition showed up uniquely for everyone whose personhood wasn’t just disputed but denied. Swirling beneath him were the ways in which not having lawful claim to yourself diminished you, yes, but in another way, condemned those who invented the disconnection.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“This is why Isaiah and Samuel didn't care, why they clung to each other even when it was offensive to the people who had once shown them a kindness: it had to be known. And why would this be offensive? How could they hate the tiny bursts of light that shot through Isaiah's body every time he saw Samuel? Didn't everybody want somebody to glow like that? Even if it could only last for never, it had to be known. That way, it could be mourned by somebody, thus remembered—and maybe, someday, repeated.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“But everyone had to begin there: girl. Girl was the alpha. Even in the womb, the healers had said, the start was there before anything might change. Circles came before lines; that was what had to be honored. When the babies arrived, they were girls irrespective of whatever peace blossomed between the legs. Girls, until after the ceremony where you could then choose: woman, man, free, or all.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“The most important thing now, his father told him: Grow. Gather. Keep. Because then, in the echoing halls, and even in future whispers, they will build monuments in your honor and you will be remembered not for your failures—not for your stumbles or your transgressions or your kills—but for only your greatest triumphs.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“He could see bodies, but it was clear that he could not see spirits. It was humorous to observe someone who did not know the terrain but refused to admit it, stumbling around, bumping into trees, then asking who put them in their path so suddenly.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“So Ruth cried and Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman's tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft. What, then, was the point of asking, "So why didn't you tell the truth?”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Reluctantly, he swept the evidence of their bliss back into a neat pile, nearer to where their misery was already neatly stacked. All of it to be sustenance for beasts anyway.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Good, he thought. Let it be ugly so it could be truth.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Maggie held a pail of river water. She knew the well water would be too sweet. The river would have a bit of salt in it, and any healing comes first through hurt before it makes it to peace. That was a terrible thing, she knew. Yet there was nothing truer. She knew it was why so many people saw no point, didn’t have the resolve to make it through, and got stuck. A sucking mud. The sinking kind. There were a lot of people there. Knee-deep. Some submerged. Some clawing their way to solid ground. How few would make it.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“You are not lost so much as you are betrayed by fools who mistook glimmer for power. They gave away all the symbols that hold sway. The penance for this is lasting. Your blood will have long been diluted by the time reason finally takes hold. Or the world itself will have been reduced to ash, making memory beside the point.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“How dare nature continue on as though his suffering didn’t even make a dent, like the bloodshed and the bodies laid were ordinary, to be broken down for fertilizer by insects and sucked up by crops.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“A curse. A curse upon you and all of your progeny. May you write in ever-pain. May you never find satisfaction. May your children eat themselves alive.'
But it was too late and the curse held no meaning because it was redundant.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“More than worshipped, all gods wanted to be adored, and his people had that in them more than Paul's: to abide more, rejoice more, revere more, surrender more; climb on top of a golden pyre and burn more.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“She could unhook herself from the need to believe beauty might have a place that wasn't subject to anyone's unwanted hands and sour breath. Wasn't no way this place was going to keep thinking she was its prime fool. Not at all. Not as long as she had fists. And even if they took those, the stubs.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“This ain't your disgrace. . . This belong to someone else.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“She would stand around after she had set the table and listen to the family give, in unison, thanks to the long-haired man whose gaze always turned upward—probably because he couldn't bear to see the havoc wreaked in his name. Or maybe he just couldn't bother to look.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. . .
When she felt her shape, it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“To leave it in the silence was the only way it could be and not break a spirit in half.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Isaiah smiled at Samuel's unwillingness, his grunts and sighs and head shaking, even though he understood the danger in it. Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“There was a specific feeling when a thing went from tiny to big inside yourself, with nothing but you in between it and heartbreak.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets