The Salt Grows Heavy Quotes

“Man mistakes his own experiences as the canvas on which all truths are drawn.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“There is nothing wrong with being a monster.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Tell me: is your joy sweeter for your knowledge of what it is like to die? Do you enjoy every sunset better? Or does it stain you, follow like the whisper of a nightmare that will not end with your waking?”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“There is a reason the hunt is central to so many narratives. For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“And you shall know her by the trail of dead”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“He was afraid one way or another of the voice that beats in your lungs. Your hurricane scream. You frightened him, how men fear things that can't be quieted.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Names are like selkie-skins, often carelessly attended, left in view of those who would misuse them. Utilized incorrectly, though, they can kill a man, can turn a girl to a thing of teeth and dead eyes, an appetite to devour worlds; can make infernos of maidens, phoenixes of bones who have been asleep for so long they've forgotten the shape of rage. Names have so much power.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Bury me, my love, and take a lock of my hair with you. Carry me through the centuries. I think I'd like to share, just a little, in what immortality is like.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Martyrs are more powerful than gods.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“The plague doctor pivots, raises themself slightly on the arch of a heel as they lean in, their voice warm against the skin of my ear. There is a grin in their next words, a texturing of teeth bared, feral.

"How do you kill any religion? You convince its flock that their shepherds are wolves".

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"We find a Judas goat".”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Certain stories are recounted so many times that they become parched of meaning, stories like those concerning the girl and her wolf in the woods, the cinder-smudged princess, the monstrous beauty who vomits pearls with every sob.

Others, however, are kept from taverns and wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fair or sweet about this world.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“I eat him alive. After everything that he has done, this seems like a fair restitution.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“The truth liberates; it cannot cripple or maul, cannot injure, not unless one declares themselves its apostate.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“For the falling star and the rising ape to meet, the former must first be debased. No myth can remain terrifying when you've seen it broken and beaten, rendered as toothless as an old crone.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“But my kind do not die until we are killed or until we relent to be consumed. I have forever. I will make this right again.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“... all at once, I am drowning in loss, and I need them to stay, no matter the price. I'd slice my larynx clean, make soup of the ribbons. I'd peel every word from my vocabulary. Anything, everything, so long as I can keep them anchored to this life.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“I read somewhere,” says my plague doctor, “that there is power to your kind’s names, isn’t there? Or was it in your voices? I can’t remember. Not right now. But there was a reason your husband sliced out your tongue, was there not? He was afraid, one way or another, of the voice that beats in your lungs, your hurricane scream. You frightened him. How men fear things that can’t be quieted.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“You would be amazed by what you can do when you have faith, when you know how to commoditize someone else’s faith, when you know the trick of words like hold on and tomorrow.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“a wife who would not be a savior.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Man mistakes his own experiences as the canvas on which all truths are drawn. He is rarely correct in this respect.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“A whipped dog is not happy to see its owner, it is merely counting the hours until the next torment.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“We lunge together, two actors in a story so old that its rhythms are recorded in marrow, retold with every new birth, repeated with every fresh death.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Questions circle: how come, why. An entire history to vivisect and catalogue, weigh in the cup of a story, every anecdote no doubt more fascinating than the last. And then a thought: is this what humanity feels like? Selfish?”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“That I want to die here, mired in the cold. That I want to race them to Death's carriage, exceeding their pace but only just, never going so far as to be unable to turn and corset their fingers in mine.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“How men fear things that can’t be quieted.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“There is nothing wrong with being a monster.” Their mouth bends. “You always know the right things to say.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy