Sorrowland Quotes

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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?”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“People watched others commit atrocities all the time. Seeing didn't transform into doing.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“The forest didn't mind illiterates and mad girls. Didn't mind that screaming was sometimes a person's only language.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“People believed whatever they needed to, to maintain a thread of power in a society that systematically stripped them of it.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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?”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Better not to belong at all than belong in a cage”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Defiance would always be Vern’s purest and most plentiful resource.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“In the woods, it had been so easy to assert herself fearlessly, but it was impossible to be a free woman among people. Society demanded a certain level of lying about oneself.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“If it was so unnatural to feel this way, then why did Vern exist? She was a part of nature, too, wasn't she? Humans and their proclivities were as much a part of the earth as trees, as rivers.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Vern stowed away the titles of books like morsels she might snack on later. She liked being reminded of the incomprehensibleness of the world. There was more to life than Cainland, more to earth than its collected sorrows. There was wonder and awe and the allure of nothingness. No one had figured everything out, but there were people who'd made their home in the searching. If they could dwell there, so could Vern.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“In the woods, where animals ruled with teeth and claws, such things mattered not a lick.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“I hope that even as Sorrrowland delves into the pain these colonial states have wrought, one might see the joy, triumph, and humor of those who resist, resist, resist. That said, there is no mincing words about some of the darker themes in this book. Note discussion and instances of racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicidality, and homophobia, inclusion of animal death and explicit violence, and references to sexual violence that have taken place off the page.
I hope you find in this book whatever it is you need right this moment.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“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 things always win.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“...she was letting the crisis invigorate her. She was like Vern in that way, more at home in conflict than in peace. Tragedy sharpened you. It was the quickest way to turn yourself into an edge.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Darkness was Vern’s country. It was all she had by way of a homeland. It pleased her to think it could be a place that nourished. Everyone was always going on about light this and light that, but what of dark?”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Maybe her husband said if she didn't find a way to get the money, he'd hurt her, or maybe Violet-Grace. So she told you whatever you needed to hear to give her the money. Or maybe he didn't threaten her, but knew that if he didn't pay his bookie what was owed, he'd kill him. And if he's dead, he can't work, and she needs that money. Maybe she intended to use it for school, but he stole it, but she told you she gave it to him to protect his image, because having you hate him doesn't help her," said Vern, the words spewing faster than she could think them up.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“People defended all manner of views inherited from their caregivers to the grave, all the while claiming to have reached these conclusions of their own sound minds.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“There's a word for that, you know. In English."
"I'd rather not know it, then," said Vern.
Gogo nodded. "Why not?"
"Because without a name for it, it's just something I am. A part of life. Once it's got a name, I know that means someone has studied it, dissected it, pulled it apart. When something has a name, they can say it's bad," said Vern, and she didn't want to hear anybody else's thoughts on what was bad anymore.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“somebody asks you your sign, Vern, they’re a waterworks queer. Just know it.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“The United States was a catalogue of known wrongs.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland