An Unkindness of Ghosts Quotes

“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?”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don't want to be scrutable.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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)”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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?”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that's so clearly not true.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Conform or die. That was his motto. I am oddly doing bits of both, each half-assedly.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts