Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city. Toni Morrison More Quotes by Toni Morrison More Quotes From Toni Morrison And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man. Toni Morrison beloved singing men 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 gone baby needs You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. Toni Morrison ugly mysterious knowing Being able to laugh got me through. Toni Morrison civil-rights able laughing 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 loneliness sea children Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet. Toni Morrison pain mother sweet Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter. Toni Morrison cities clever winter Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. Toni Morrison funny-things hurt baby Love is divine only and difficult always. Toni Morrison difficult divine love-is He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me? Toni Morrison fingers faces hands Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow. Toni Morrison beloved yesterday needs How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. Toni Morrison imagination wish trying 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 falling-in-love hate knowing He said, 'Always. Always. Toni Morrison said I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got. Toni Morrison want feels mean 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 laughter girlfriend summer It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds. Toni Morrison would-be bird years You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far. Toni Morrison gone long 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 night hands years 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 dying suicide years
