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.
Let her go?′ asked Son, and he smiled a crooked smile. Let go the woman you had been looking for everywhere just because she was difficult? Because she had a temper, energy, ideas of her own and fought back? Let go a woman whose eyebrows were a study, whose face was enough to engage your attention all your life? Let go a woman who was not only a woman but a sound, all the music he had ever wanted to play, a world and a way of being in it? Let that go? ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t.
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.
It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding.
We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows. “It means no money,” said Bride. “Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.” “Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!” “Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?
The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.
Pauline, what would you do if your own brother had a party and didn’t invite you?’ I said ifn I really wanted to go to that party, I reckoned I’d go anyhow. Never mind what he want. She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was. Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can’t like folks just ’cause they has the same mama.
She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman.
She cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.
The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it.
He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
They could not save their friend from the world. She broke.
Funny how you lose sight of some things and memory others.