They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate.
There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.
Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your bes...
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own.
Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.
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.
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes;...
I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
You got two feet, Sethe, not four. he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.
The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.
Much handled things are always soft(27).
Imagine something. Something that fits in the dark. Say the dark is the sky at night. Imagine something in it.A star?Yes.I can’t. I can’t see it.Okay. Don’t try to see it. Try to be it. Would you like...
I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?''I'm looking now.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment.
She is dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us and her adult life turned out okay- so I heard. But then when we were all twelve or less, it seemed as though she floated behind...