Quotes by Nalo Hopkinson

“I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have! The shock woke me right up: It was my original, the body I had replaced t...”

“I've learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often th...”

“Mami, Ti-Jeanne said, I should go and get Baby. He ain’t take to Tony.Hmph. Child got some sense, then. More than some I could name. But leave he there. He have to learn that he can’t always have w...”

“I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself. No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her.”

“She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive.”

“Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness.”

“This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the s...”

“Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship.”

“She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food.”

“She curled up on the pallet and stared into the dark, praying for a peaceful sleep.Prayers didn’t do no good, oui. Antonio chased her all night. (In the book Antonio, her father, beats and sexually...”

“She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!”

“Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else.”

“Lasirèn, pray you a quick death for Hopping John. Pray you no more of this life for him. Even though no gods answer black people’s prayers here in this place.”

“All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?”

“Desire makes us all babies again.”

“It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white.”

“I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.”

“It was time to be honest with myself. To survive all the shame this world will throw at you, you have to hold yourself tall, look your accuser straight in the eye. Even if it’s your own face lookin...”

“Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.”

“Children, I said to her. For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”