“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“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.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.'
'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“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. ”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“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. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“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. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“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.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“You been gone too long, Sula.
Not too long, but maybe too far.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“ It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest.
Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”
It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“...Sula was wrong. Hell ain't things lasting forever. Hell is change." Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn't last. One day she wouldn't even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.
Why, even in hate here I am thinking of what Sula said.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“I sure did live in this world.'
'Really? What have you got to show for it?'
'Show? To who? I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.'
'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.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“Much handled things are always soft(27).”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
“The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Sula
Toni Morrison
Born place: in Lorain, Ohio, The United States
Born date February 18, 1931
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“My motto for fashion: If you can’t afford to make an elegant statement, make a ridiculous one.”
― Stacey Jay, quote from Romeo Redeemed
“You shouldn't give him a ride, Grace!" Meme snapped. "He's likely to strangle you and dump your body in the lake."
"Is this true?" I asked Callahan.
"I was thinking about it," he admitted.”
― Kristan Higgins, quote from Too Good to Be True
“Heimdall had already decided that he would not pass. If he attempted to force his way through he would have no one to blame for his lost head but himself.”
― Mike Vasich, quote from Loki
“There are moments in your life when the big pieces slide and shift. Sometimes the big changes dong happen gradually but all at once. That's how it was for us. That was the day we discovered that friends can do things for you that your parents can't.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from 3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows
“The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Towers of Silence
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