“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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,”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“You Lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

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

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

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

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point? Nothingness was a fate worse than pain.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the history.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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?”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep