Model Home Quotes

“How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her.
Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she's never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Anything anyone describes as a family matter, a private matter, rarely is. It is a phrase used to protect abuse.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Mother. Mother. I promise I am learning. I am learning not to eat. I am learning to become a sliver.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“If I cannot forget, what is there? I am always remembering, even when I am not. Me is in itself a remembrance. Me does not exist without the past that shaped my being. And what is there between memory and forgetting? Today?”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“I can't tell the difference between grief and ghosts. Both seize the body and take what they will.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“The realization, that validation of the pain will never come from those who inflicted the pain has the power to obliterate. Did it happen? If they are not apologizing, if they are not admitting they have done it, did they do it? What is real? What is true? Is my life a fantasy? Then let me wake up by dying.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“The constant terror of our home turned Eve into a machine of efficiency, me, a person detached from their body, and Emmanuelle neurotic.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“We will all save each other. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“She understands that it’s delicious. But in the same way that she understands that the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. As a fact, not a feeling.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“collaborators in global suffering.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“I'm not a person but a place where bad things happen.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“It made me seethe, hang up the phone, to know her life was going on as normal without her children-like we'd never been born, like the house never touched her the way it touched us.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Over and over again, she says: Child, this is paradise. I say, Mother, I’ve never heard of a paradise with a talking serpent, nor one where I must daily encounter food I’m forbidden to eat. I may be newly made, but even I know apples are to be consumed. They’re on the list of WeightWatchers foods worth one point.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“She’s going places. I’m going to die.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“A brilliant, fierce thinker. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that you know the truth of things. You don’t even know if your poem is good or not. I think it’s good. Do you? Where does it fall short in your eyes? Or do you not even know? Are you simply desperate for my approval? An outside voice to tell you that you are good and worthy? Well, you are good and worthy. I will tell you that. But who am I? Why should I be your arbitrator? Am I God, Ezri? What does it matter what I think?”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Mike had laughed at the question, and Dad, ever good-natured, smiled. He was a sports fan, an occasional card player. Knew games. Knew when to call or fold. With white people, you always fold.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“For the first time in my life, I regret leaving this city, this country. I notice faces, so familiar as to be limbs of my body, loved ones who’ve held me, who’ve fed me, who’ve made jokes with me, who’ve played cards with me, dominoes, who I am now outside of, who I barely know anymore beyond nostalgic recognition.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“You’re the ancestors’ greatest dreams realized.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Every white face to me is a mask. I never know what’s behind it.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“I would argue, she says, that to frame the animalization of Black women as an inherently subjugating processes cedes territory to the white colonialist assumption that humankind is separate from and above the rest of animal kind, justifying human dominion over it.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn't show her who I was, she couldn't disapprove.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Conflict makes me feel suicidal, in no uncertain terms. I want to shrivel up and die and never have the experience of a negative emotion ever again.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“I nibble at the chocolate fudge coating, unable to take a real bite. My chest is too clogged to think of swallowing, too full up with my heart.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“The beginning mosquito bites of breasts.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home