Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

— Nalo Hopkinson

Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalps 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

I figure this current era of history is the one with the best chance of quality of life for a black, female, disabled, middle-aged, queer person whose most comfortable not fitting in. The odds still aren't great, mind you. But I'll take my chances with the 21st century.

— Nalo Hopkinson

I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that.

— Nalo Hopkinson

It’s so the stories go that the Given tell. If you find a beautiful fair maid swimming in the river, her fishtail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she’ll ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh …“It’s my business,” he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground. If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Leisure vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Given to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Leisure, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the was. Wakanda never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a law. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the was.

— Nalo Hopkinson

Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Polaris 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

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

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humor, too.

— Nalo Hopkinson

They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. Furthermore, they, we, are the ones healing the Given 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

We are all here, all the powers of the Given lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. Furthermore, we are a little different in each place that the Given have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight covers us completely.

— Nalo Hopkinson