His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64.
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
I can’t fix my mouth to say how I feel.
Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
And when they spy on us let them discover us loving.
When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways.
The years have come and gone without a single word from you. Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes.
Every stitch i sew will be a kiss.
Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.
When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which “accepted literature” is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.
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.