Alaya Dawn Johnson > Quotes

“To love light, you have to love dark. I'm not trying to be profound, I know you'll understand. I don't mean that you have to hate to love, or that you have to die to live.
I mean that sometimes, you turn out the lights just to turn them back on.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Then you remember that Jack--that's his name, the mac & cheese--plays lacrosse. That's probably where he got all those yummy muscles. You need two hands for lacrosse.
A pinky? Damn, you might as well starve yourself.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Zombies Vs. Unicorns

“But I know better than anyone how dangerous trying can be, and how destructive. Maybe it's better to let bad things happen than tear yourself apart trying to stop the inevitable.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Think of it like the best mac and cheese you've ever had. No neon yellow Velveeta and bread crumbs. I'm talking gourmet cheddar, the expensive stuff from Vermont that crackles as it melts into the crust on top. Imagine if right before you were about to tear into it, the mac and cheese starts talking to you?”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Zombies Vs. Unicorns

“They think they've gone to heaven," he says. "They don't realize that means they're dead.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“There's a song", I say.
"There's always a song", he says.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Hands and lips and teeth, and you'd forgotten-no, you'd never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Zombies Vs. Unicorns

“What is this, Enki?” says the Queen. “Do you not honor me?”

Enki’s smile is wide and bright. “I give you the greatest honor,” he says.

“You are dressed in the manner of a slave,” says she, “in a city where there are none.”

“There aren’t,” he agrees, though now his smile seems too sharp for his words. “But there is the verde.”

“And what of it?”

“I am dressed in the manner of my people.”

“Are we not your people?” And we see that the Queen is torn between amusement and anger. Enki is leading her in a dance, but has not tapped out its rhythm.

“You are everything to me.”

“And yet you come before us hardly as a king.”

“I come before you,” says Enki, “as a simple verde boy.” He takes a quick step back, almost skipping, and his dust-lightened hair bobs around his ears. “I will leave you as a king.” And when the drums start, that’s how he dances: as a king.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“So I take my lover, my king, and I put him in a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“In the dark, I seem to stretch. Without a body to witness, I grow and grow with my pleasure. I feel like a constellation, a concept hung on a scattering of stars.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Ignoring your subconscious is like neglecting the termite infestation in your basement. Sooner or later, the consequences of neglect will far outweigh the momentary unpleasantness of clearing the nests.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug

“You can’t samba in a data stream,”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“When the world is destroyed, someone must remake the world. I think you’d call that art.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“I’m nothing but forward momentum and a curse.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“A good rival is almost like a friend, isn’t she? You make me try harder.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“The kings die so that their choice of the next Queen can be irrevocable, unassailable, and unprejudiced.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Just looking at him makes me short of breath, makes me want to cry, makes me want to rage and scream.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“How much of yourself will you give them in exchange?”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“morality is the change that falls from your pockets when you climb up the ladder.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug

“He says this last with his cheek against mine. I think my heart might run away inside my chest. I think he knows.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug

“After everything that's happened, her fear of requesting a prescription or of asking Trevor about his mother baffles her. Shouldn't life-altering events make you less afraid of the little stuff? But it's the little stuff that paralyzes her: talking, eating, dressing, sleeping. Everyone in school is afraid of the apocalypse; she is afraid of living through it.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug

“He smiles at me; the white of his teeth catches the white of the city lights. I squint, but I won’t close my eyes. I can’t. I want to see him, forever, until I never see him again.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Gil dances like the old days, like he wants to tempt his own death.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Fight, Pea. If we die, let it be screaming, not with a bullet to the back of the head because we hid behind the line. Fight, Pea. I love our daughter more than I should, more than any logic can explain, and she doesn't yet exist apart from you, and I am telling you to fight her, our sweet Durga, if in entering this world she tries to take you from it-

And if she does, or if one of those bullets finds its mark on me, please believe, Phyllis- we are connected by more than this love or this lifetime. When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again, seven lifetimes and seven lifetimes more, until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“Righteous or not, all vengeance bore poison fruit.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories

“There’s movement in my peripheral vision, background noise that seems to hem me in, but Enki binds me like he has from the first moment I saw him, with smiles and dance and eyes that see clearly.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

“Sometimes I don’t know how we will survive each other. Sometimes the greatest violence you can do to another person is to love them.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints