Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

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.

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

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

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 abuses her long-term; she eventually kills him)

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

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

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 steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it.

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

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

“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.

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 what he want.

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.

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 two years before, same full, tarty-looking lips; same fat thighs, rubbing together with every step; same outsize ass; same narrow torso that seemed grafted onto a lower body a good three sizes bigger, as though God had glued leftover parts together.

Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you'll find stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them once they get under their own skins-they can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively.