Nalo Hopkinson > Quotes

“The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn’t mentioned such an important plot point.”
― Nalo Hopkinson

“How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle. ”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are.
(interview)”
― Nalo Hopkinson

“Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“Suck all the juice this life will give!”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“I sometimes wish I could fine people every time they use black street slang to prove how hip they are.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Just charge them a residual. White people, Chinese people; even those boho Obamanegroes with their braided hemp necklaces, you understand me? … Except for dirt-poor white people surviving the life in some hood somewhere. And those Filipino prisoners you see on YouTube dancing to Michael Jackson songs. I figure those guys have earned the right to drop the occasional ‘homie’ now and then …”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“I’m going to check the world’s best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldn’t even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“The African powers, child. The spirits. The loas. The orishas. The oldest ancestors. You will hear people from Haiti and Cuba and Brazil and so call them different names. You will even hear some names I ain’t tell you, but we all mean the same thing. Them is the ones who does carry we prayers to God Father, for he too busy to listen to every single one of we on earth talking at he all the time. Each of we have a special one who is we father or mother, and no matter what we call it, whether Shango or Santeria or Voudun or what, we all doing the same thing. Serving the spirits.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

“But one of the progressions I've made is from being a depressed teenager who saw how powerless she was to change all the ills around her to being a mostly cheerful fifty-something who realizes there are all kinds of ways of working towards positive change. I am not as active in doing so as my conscience would have me be, but I am not at all passive, or powerless. And that's because I'm not alone. 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 the direst opposite, in fact. But we're all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Falling in Love with Hominids

“Do not ask your future, or you will forget to live in your present.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you’d best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war. Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

“They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Why? Because I played god with you? Baby girl, that’s what I do. And not lightly, either.” He thought about that for a second. “Well, yes, sometimes lightly. You know what they say about all work and no play.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story”
― Nalo Hopkinson

“Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back...
The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

“We do not know a planet that is home. We are always home. It is our job to see and map and learn languages and stories and carry them from place to place.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

“She calls herself Fleet ‘cause she used to be a flute player, back in the day. BC, you know?”
“British Colombia?”
He looked sad. “No, Before Crack.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“Some days I hit that wall really hard, and I have to tell myself that I don’t believe that stuff anymore. That all the things in my brain, all the little voices whispering that I’m Doing It Wrong, this is just how hegemonies work: by continuous reinforcement; by convincing people that there is only one true way (or a handful of such); by promoting and valuing, over and over, the same narratives without thought to how harmful they can be.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 73, June 2016: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!

“In the back of my mind’s eye, everything had a fuzzy green haze on it, like a brand-new tennis ball. The world was getting its Shine on.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“How you mean, ‘doughnut hole’?” Ti-Jeanne had asked. “That’s what they call it when an inner city collapses and people run to the suburbs,” he’d answered.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

“What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“I wanted to believe that Makandal flew away, but my wishes can’t fly freely so. They’re rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“Mister Pierre was finally looking at the baby’s body. “A boy? Why aren’t you two lackwits seeing to my child?” There had been women’s voices in this room all these long hours. Mister Pierre’s booming was like sudden thunder during a soft rain.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see, they said, where I was headed if I wasn’t careful. In fact, it was where I was headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later. My parents were putting in their vote for later.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 73, June 2016: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!

“Sex is powerful and beautiful and dangerous.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Falling in Love with Hominids

“We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads