Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.
The Lord don’t like ugly, she say. And he ain’t stuck on pretty.
It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how I come to know trees fear man.
I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is.
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.
I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.
Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two “presents.” One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment – the “moment” that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer “present” that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.
Peace”: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.
Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don’t have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can’t be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.
I think humanity has forgotten – this planet is for joy.
Life is very different when you have a good friend. I’ve seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don’t often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself.
Hard times’ is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa’s ‘hard times’ were made harder by them.
The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.
The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one another. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their experiences. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain? she thought.
This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.
I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.