Sarah L. Delany · 320 pages
Rating: (12.5K votes)
“Life is short, and it's up to you to make it sweet.
Sarah L. (Sadie) Delany”
“Anyway, they went and built this silly housing project, with us living right across the street from it. Some of the children from the housing project got into trouble. You can't just take people who don't have anything, don't know what they're doing, pack them in a bunch of buildings, and expect it's going to all work out somehow.
- Sadie”
“When people ask me how we've lived past one hundred, I say, 'Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!
A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany”
“When you're in a train and it breaks down, well, there you is. But when you're in a plane and it breaks down, there you AIN'T.”
“All I ever wanted in my life was to be treated as an individual. I have succeeded, to some extent. At least I'm sure that in the Lord's eyes, I am an individual. I am not a "colored" person, or a "Negro" person, in God's eyes. I am just me! The Lord won't hold it against me that I'm colored because He made me that way! He thinks I am beautiful! And so do I, even with all my wrinkles! I am beautiful!
-Bessie”
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think…Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.”
“Oh thank you, Jesus."
"It's Roarke." He tapped a finger on Eve's head. "You really shouldn't forget your own husband's name.”
“In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with.”
“Hannah shouldn’t have to get braces. Maybe she can’t afford them or maybe she’s scared to get them. Either way, she shouldn’t have to fill her mouth with metal so that some shitheads will leave her alone.”
“I, Hercule Poirot, am not amused.”
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