36 quotes found
“Take off that coat,' he told him.'Sir?''You heard me.'The boy slipped out of his jacket, whining, 'What you gonna do? What I'm gonna wear?'The man untied the baby from her chest and wrapped it in t...”
“Let me tell you something. A man aint a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he cant chop down because theyre inside.”
“You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.”
“Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”
“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.”
“She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two ...”
“And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried...”
“God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.”
“What's fair ain't necessarily right.”
“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”
“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood...”
“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”
“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day l...”
“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
“He licked his lips. Well, if you want my opinion-I dont, She said. I have my own.”
“I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else--and the one time I did it was took...”
