He wants to put his story next to hers.
I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that’s what an artist is-a politician.
Birth, life, and death – each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.
I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and I don’t need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.
We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Lonely, ain’t it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
A son ain’t what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in bewteen.