Well, you not the first by a long shot. An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.
Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.
Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever.
Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it.
He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now, that was freedom.
They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.
Poison is like the drowned; it always floats.
Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.
Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence.
This is precisely the time when artists go to work – not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” Toni Morrison.
To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.
Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.
And if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold?
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.
Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do.
She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.
Amy dragged her eyes over Sethe’s face as though she would never give out so confidential a piece of information as that to a perfect stranger.
Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.
That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.
She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.