I re-post myself from
my other blog on Black arts:
Well, I finally finished reading Toni Morrison's
"Beloved" and, as it is my custom, here I'm gonna leave some of the best quotations of the book (believe me, there were many many more). I promise not to spoil anything as I expect you to read it someday. It's a fantastic book and a must if you like black arts (as I guess you do cause you're following this blog). Feel free to tell me which quote you liked the most:
For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing […] was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one. (Such a sad thought)
Then, with the sun straight up over their heads, they trotted off, leaving the sheriff behind among the damnedest bunch of coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred. (Hi, sarcasm, nice to meet you)
Some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit. Like a flag hoisted, this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the whip, the fist, the lie, long before it went public. (Scary)
Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. (Summary of Negro history in a few lines. Perfectly expressed)
Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be. (Something I also feel from time to time)
Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction.
If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. (This feeling is more developed in the book, but I found this sentence so fascinating and frightening at the same time)
When she wasn’t smiling she smiled, and I never saw her own smile. (Just love this use of words)
Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. (One of the best quotes in the book)
He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all in the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” (What love is)
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” (Best final sentence ever)
