Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How ’bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.
It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.
Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.
He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.
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.
Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.
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?