#quotebook

[livinqstone]

We want to tell her things the way she tells us things. We want to share everything we know with her. We want to tell her that she's special. We want to tell her that we'd only been searching for food those months and months and months ago, but instead we'd found—we don't know the word for her yet. We will invent a new word. Our land creature is worth a new word.

— Rivers Solomon, The Deep

[livinqstone]

"You did not come from a god," she says. We don't think she means this cruelly, but it bothers us still. We know a god is a special thing. "Could you be our god?" we ask, words hoarse and croaky. We would be content to spend our days basking in her presence, swimming in the water as she fished and told us stories. "I am too small to be a god," she says.

— Rivers Solomon, The Deep

[livinqstone]

"I see," said Esther, with a boldness she would later marvel at for days, "that we have many things we could share with each other, if you're interested in further trade. Perhaps someday you'll give me something worth another song." She couldn't put words to the look on Rin's face. She only knew, very sharply and deeply, that she wanted to go on being the cause of it.

— Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

[livinqstone]

When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance―that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it.

— Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

[livinqstone]

Luca pulled his hand away. Or at least he planned to. The plan had barely communicated itself to his body when Matti's on hand rose, trapping Luca's beneath it just as Luca has trapped Matti's yesterday. Matti's eyes opened. His lashes were spiked with water. That was enough for Luca. He had been wanting for weeks, and now the desire was large enough and unbearable enough that he couldn't find it within himself to do anything but take, as he took most things that he wanted, in the end. He stepped closer, used his hand to angle Matti's face slightly downwards, and kissed his way through the film of salt water to the beat of Matti's mouth beneath.

— Freya Marske, Swordcrossed

[livinqstone]

"Well? What is it then?" asked Amaba, letting her voice get away from her. She spoke loudly enough that Yetu had to swim away several feet. "I'm sorry. Though this would be much less difficult if you answered when I spoke to you, like someone normal." "Someone normal wouldn't be able to tell you that the object is a comb. Someone normal wouldn't be able to tell you that a comb was a tool the wajinru foremothers used in their hair," said Yetu. "Someone normal would never know these things. Someone normal couldn't fill your hole. You are someone normal, and you don't know anything."

— Rivers Solomon, The Deep

[livinqstone]

Yetu appreciated Amaba's caring nature, but sometimes her gentle chiding turned into chafing, and Yetu was reminded of all that was wrong between them. Yetu would never be the easy child, nor Amaba the mother to give space. What hopes Yetu had for a connection beyond caretaker and caretaken were squashed. Would she always be just the historian, over time supplanted by the voices of the past?

— Rivers Solomon, The Deep

[livinqstone]

I thought we really would all die, even in the shade of the wagon, and I sat there trying, through the molten slag that was my brain now, to piece together what I should say to Helios when I saw him. He'd be livid. Did you die honourably in battle, knight? No, sir, I suffocated drunk in the back of a wagon like a fucking moron.

— Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus