Rivers Solomon Quotes

Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it. Song of Solomon 8: 7.

What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.

Forgetting was not the same as healing.

I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?

Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious.

because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas- sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell- ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina- tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

You say madness such as mine doesn’t exist, but it would exist in you, too, if you had to experience the ugly things I do all the time,” she said,

People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don't want to be scrutable.

The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude. Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another.

One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.

She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

You Lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.

What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?

Where history saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.

The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?

We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.

You're one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.

The audiobook that you are currently listening to and are likely upset that you listened to too quickly. Were you at double speed? I know you were.

Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that's so clearly not true.

Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.

When you're everyone in the past and when you're for everyone in the present, you're no one. Nobody. You don't exist. I didn't exist.

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

She's more delicate than you'd think," I say. She's glass. I'm glass. We're all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments. It's a circus act.

You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.

Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.

People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.

She was a girl made of aches and she flung her body at the world in the hopes that something, anything, might soothe the tendernesses.

We wait to be numbed by it, for the grief to become so much that we no longer feel it. That point never arrives. Our numbers reduce, and the rage grows.

Conform or die. That was his motto. I am oddly doing bits of both, each half-assedly.

How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?

Aster didn't mean it. As much as it frustrated her, she understood the logic of Giselle's psychosis. Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There's no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise. (63)

Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered. Aster sat up, and Theo helped her prop two pillows beneath her head. “Is that so? Then I am magic. I say it, therefore it is true,” she said.

I had a sister named Inertia,"said Metusine. "Died. Ill from the day she was born. Mother thought if she named her that it would keep her alive. Keep her in motion.

I like the woods,” she said. “In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn’t matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms. It turns sorrows into flowers.

There'd be no forgiveness this time. It was one thing to destroy a person, but to destroy their work was a sacrilege Aster couldn't easily forget. All that was left of a person's life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.

History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend to it.

Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only t be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I'm a lover of stories even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things.

I’m not maternal but that doesn’t mean I don’t love. I love Aster. I love all the girls and women I look after. It is hard to be in somebody’s presence for so long and not develop something like love.

You are an anomaly of a man," she said. "Perhaps because I'm not a man at all." He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her. "Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling," she said..."Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?" "I think it doesn't matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not," he answered.

That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

People watched others commit atrocities all the time. Seeing didn't transform into doing.

She didn't need much. Didn't need to be adored and loved and called nice things. All she wished for was perfunctory respect paid to the fact that she was, indeed, alive. Real, breathing, thinking, movable parts and all.

Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.

Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it. Song of Solomon 8:7. In other words, yes, she still loved Søren.

at that moment Aster knew gods weren’t real, because if they were, they’d end this now. All of humankind. A snap of the fingers.

There were worse things than being a motherless child. Without a past, Aster was boundless. She could metamorphose. She could be a shiny, magnificent version of herself.

I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.

I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.

Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!

Living without detail long-term memories allowed for spontaneity and lack of regret, but after a certain amount of time had passed, they needed more.

It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.

if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point? Nothingness was a fate worse than pain.

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country’s edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless.

I AM THANKFUL FOR THE ocean, from which life springs. I am thankful for the ancestors, who lived, which is all any of us can do. And I am thankful for our vast human history, wide and various enough that there are legacies of triumph for every legacy of trauma. Everything is always changing, which means nothing can ever be hopeless. The

In my language, there is no word for I. To even come close, you must say, E’tesh’lem vereme pri’lus, which means, This one here who is apart from all. It’s the way we say lonely and alone. It’s the way we say outsider. It’s the way we say weak. Everyone always wonders about I love you. In Ifrek you say, Mev o’tem, or, We are together. “How do you say, I’m tired?” people ask. “Ek’erb nal veesh ly. The time for rest is upon us.

Dear Nastenka, I know I describe splendidly, but, excuse me, I don't know how else to do it. At this moment, dear Nastenka, at this moment I am like the spirit of King Solomon when, after lying a thousand years under seven seals in his urn, those seven seals were at last taken off. At this moment, Nastenka, when we have met at last after such a long separation - for I have known you for ages, Nastenka, because I have been looking for some one for ages, and that is a sign that it was you I was looking for, and it was ordained that we should meet now - at this moment a thousand valves have opened in my head, and I must let myself flow in a river of words, or I shall choke. And so I beg you not to interrupt me, Nastenka, but listen humbly and obediently, or I will be silent.

She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams.

Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?

There was no talking Ollie and her ilk into believing Vern and her ilk were actually people. They were collateral damage in a useless battle waged to attain more power.

Song of Solomon told me a man and woman’s passion is intended to be mutual.” His smile dissolved and he looked troubled. “A shared blessing.

It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the history.

It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different

When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton.

People believed whatever they needed to, to maintain a thread of power in a society that systematically stripped them of it.

Are you now so deluded you think you exist outside the category of everything?

Days disappeared into Concept, Facts/Fictions, Theoreticals, Events That Once Occurred but Might as Well Have Happened to Someone Else for How Unreal and Faraway They Feel.

All that was left of a person’s life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.

The Remembrance took more than it gave. It required she remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once. Not just that, she had to put order and meaning to the events, so that the others could understand. She had to help them open their minds so they could relive the past too. It was a painful process.

I am the only one who gets to decide what is in my best interest. Not you, Theo. The fact that you have been given arbitrary power over me does not mean that you should exert that power when it suits you.

I’m not the maternal type. Lullabies bore me. The idea of a child hanging off my breast, using me for sustenance, makes me very angry for some reason. Probably because I am always angry about everything. I am like a gramophone and the volume’s too loud, and you can’t find the off button, and all you can do is cover your ears until the end of the record.

I'm not maternal but that doesn't mean I don't love. I love Aster. I love all the girls and women I look after. It is hard to be in somebody's presence for so long and not develop something like love. I don't have romantic feelings. I never fell in love with a person the way princesses fall in love with princes. I never wanted to be with nobody in bed. Aster, though, my love for her is—it's malignant. And if I try to chop it off, all the bits of love will spread everywhere else and infect me worse.

Not all souls are the same. Some rivers flow quietly between their banks; others overflow. There exist choice souls, whose love of God cannot be confi ned to the narrow limits of what is considered a normal faith. Their cup runs over. Their love of God burns. Solomon’s Song answers to the desires of such hearts.

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight.

My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the "peculiar institution." What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.

I don't know why, but I'm not thankful. I'm never thankful. I want to be, I do, but all I feel is this annoyance that won't stop. Every nice thing that anyone could ever think to do to me leaves me feeling enraged. It's like, too little too late, buddy.

He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back.

What turned babies, fragile and curious, into Shermans? Into Ollies? Into men who could not interact with a new thing without wanting to dominate it? What order of events did Vern need to disrupt in the lives of the millions upon millions who woke up every morning proud to be Americans? What made someone love lies? She saw that cursed flag on the hunter's T-shirt and wondered if he know about the glut of traumas that define this nation's founding. Had he fallen so in love with the myth of belonging that he thought the corpses of his imaginary foes were worthwhile sacrifices toward barbecues, megachurches, bandannas, and hot dogs? The primary freedoms this nation protected were the ones to own and annihilate.

My child,” Amaba said, frightened. “What sickness is this? What madness would cause one to put oneself in fatal harm purposely, knowingly? Surely, it cannot exist.

The rememberings carried her mind away from the ocean to the past. These days, she was more there than here.

These didn't have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating.

Words mattered now, in the moment. They spoiled quickly when held inside, and what did they mean when offered too late but nothing at all?

Better not to belong at all than belong in a cage

Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?

It was summer, and the world was as bright as a lightning flash. Blue sky. Red dirt. Everything was set alight. Vern tried to cherish it, to turn toward the sun the way bluebells did, but Vern still lusted after the dark of the woods, where she was born, where her true self had been made.

This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.

Aster, occasionally, through no will of her own, worried she wasn’t pretty enough, and why? Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious. Pretty couldn’t be replicated in a lab. She, as much as anyone, enjoyed the prismatic sweep of amaranth in bloom and the geography of animalian bodies. Yet when applied to people, it didn’t jive with her that pretty was meant for some and not others. More pressingly, it didn’t jive with Aster that some days she wanted to be one of those folks who was prettier than the other folks. It was like wanting to be more vanadium-based, or wanting to have orange-pigmented skin—arbitrary, bizarre, pointless. Still, she wanted it, and Theo made her feel like it was already so.

I don’t have time to nurse an acquaintance,” she continued, “especially not one as old as ours. An acquaintance this old that has never bloomed into friendship never will, and it’s hardly worth the upkeep and maintenance required.

Dear Sirs," Flick began before loudly inhaling, "On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts - Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She's healed up now so you don't have to worry about it happening again.

Running had become her favorite mode of transport. She lived for that brief snap of true flight, both feet in the air at once. Jumping down a half-flight of stairs then catapulting down another. Aerial Aster. Sky Master Aster! Barely Avoiding Disaster Aster! There was less time lost in transport when she ran as fast as she could, no care for her own safety.

What does it matter where any place is unless you are trying to return to it? It'd do you well not to think of here at all. You're trying to find yourself, aren't you? To do that, you must go. Thinking of this place will only hold you back.

There’s exactly two flavors of queer drama, far as I can tell. The kind that stems from people like you and Gogo, thinking you’re above it all, all chill to the bitter end, and the kind that comes from people that can’t help but feel every peccadillo as a tragedy. Always with the waterworks, those people. I’m sure it has to do with astrology or something. My friend Coline is always tryna read my star chart. If somebody asks you your sign, Vern, they’re a waterworks queer. Just know it.

It was strange to be having such a conversation with her Amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the history. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn't so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead. Goodness, how'd did she missed it?

A scientist, Aster had learned something GIselle had not: decoding the past was like decoding the physical world. The best that could be hoped for was a working model. A reasonable approximation. That was to say, no matter what Aster learned of Lune, there was no piecing together the full mystery of her life. There was no hearing her laugh or feeling her embrace. A ghost is not a person. (147)

She and Vern both were … not touch-starved, precisely, but used to a particular type of emotional isolation that came after years of convincing yourself it was all right, better even, to be alone. As a defense mechanism, such self-delusion had its place, but once the farce faded, it was like your whole body transformed all its years of misbelieving into insatiable hunger for contact.

Could it possible for humans to breath under water? A fetus in its mother's womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air. Are Drexians water-breathing, aquatically-mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by god to teach us or terrorize us? Their stories took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression and the founding of a utopia civilization.

This story takes place on stolen land. While Sorrowland is set in a United States with a speculative and amorphous shape, the geography and settings explored are based on areas traditionally stewarded by the Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, and Lipan Apache in what are colonially known as Central and East Texas, as well as on lands historically, inhabited by various Plains nations with shifting territories, including the Apsáalooke/Crow, Oceti Sakowin/Sioux, and Arapaho, in what settlers have designated Wyoming and Montana. No story of the so-called United States is complete without an understanding of its foundation on genocide and dislocation, nor without acknowledgment of the Indigenous people still here fighting the ongoing occupation.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs, brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance? Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen; and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals, and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal, and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations, it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns, and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God as His son set, and that was the New Testament. Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves' progress, and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftly as the sea's lace dries in the sun, but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation; then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning.

I just mean that she’s different, you know? Not like us. She’s not so good with, hm, how do you say, human interaction and any trappings of decorum or rules. I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.” Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she? “Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu. Though her foremothers were two-legs, she felt she had very little in common with these strange land walkers, whose teeth were weak and flat. “I am animal.” Suka played with their breath in the back of their throat then pushed it through their mouth—a strange habit of the two-legs. It was too thoughtful to be a sigh. Too calm and content to be a groan. Just a sound, meaningless, as they considered what to say. “Yes, but only animal-ish?” they said, hedging. Yetu didn’t understand what that could mean. She groaned, unable to keep track of it all. Without the vivid images of the rememberings, she was left only with outlines of memories, and even those were waning. Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it.