The Measure of Our Lives Page 2
“Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise.”
“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.”
“But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”
“Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”
“Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.”
“This is the it you’ve been looking for.”
“What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”
“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”
“Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since 1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only celebrant.”
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.”
“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house.”
“Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.”
“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 best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.”
“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”
“Her color is a cross she will always carry.”
“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another.”
“Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. ‘There must be another one like you,’ he whispered to her. ‘There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.’ ”
“When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.”
“More awful than the fear of danger was the fear of looking foolish—of being excited when others were laid back—of being somehow manipulated.”
“You looking good.” “Devil’s confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.”
“You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.”
“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 it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
“The women’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum. Men grow irritable, but they know it’s all for them. They relax. Standing by, unable to do anything but watch, is a trial, but I don’t say a word.”
“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.”
“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
“In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs.”
“Where do you get the right to decide our lives?…I’ll tell you where. From that hog’s gut that hangs down between your legs. Well, let me tell you something…you will need more than that. I don’t know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.”
“Fondling their weapons, feeling suddenly so young and good they are reminded that guns are more than decoration, intimidation or comfort. They are meant.”
“They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.”
“A son ain’t what a woman say. A son is what a man do.”
“What a man leaves behind is what a man is.”
“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.’ ”
“Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”
“Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark—weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more—but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.”
“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.”
“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
“He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.”
“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”
“My face absent in blue water you find only to crush it?”
“Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?”
“She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.”
“Death is a sure thing but life is just as certain. Problem is you can’t know in advance.”
“ ‘You in trouble,’ she says, yawning. ‘Deep, deep trouble. Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.’ ”
“It had been the longest time sin
ce 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.”
“Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch and interpret every sound in the universe.”
“You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.”
“Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.”
“They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin.”
“I don’t want to be free of you because I am alive only with you.”
“To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”
“Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”
“She didn’t say so, but it suddenly occurred to her that good sex was not knowledge. It was barely information.”
“There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.”
“You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that?”
“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”
“It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time.”
“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
“ ‘Gimme hate, Lord,’ he whimpered. ‘I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it….It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?’ ”
“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”
“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God—carefully.”
“More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?”
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
“A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.”
“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”
“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.”
“The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever.”
“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
“Her passions were narrow but deep.”
“Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.”
“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
“I dream a dream that dreams back at me.”
“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.’ ”
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?”…“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
“You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”
ATTRIBUTIONS
1 The Source of Self-Regard, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”
2 Love
3 The Source of Self-Regard, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”
4 Tar Baby
5 Beloved
6 The Bluest Eye
7 The Bluest Eye
8 Sula
9 Sula
10 The Bluest Eye
11 Paradise
12 Love
13 The Source of Self-Regard, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”
14 Beloved
15 A Mercy
16 A Mercy
17 God Help the Child
18 Beloved
19 The Source of Self-Regard, “Site of Memory”
20 The Bluest Eye
21 Tar Baby
22 Song of Solomon
23 Jazz
24 The Source of Self-Regard, “Race Matters”
25 Jazz
26 Sula (dedication)
27 The Source of Self-Regard, “The Site of Memory”
28 Tar Baby (foreword)
29 Love
30 Beloved
31 Sula
32 Love
33 A Mercy
34 Sula
35 The Bluest Eye
36 God Help the Child
37 The Origin of Others
38 The Origin of Others
39 Beloved
40 The Source of Self-Regard, “The Writer Before the Page”
41 God Help the Child
42 God Help the Child
43 Beloved
44 Sula
45 Home
46 Home
47 Home
48 Paradise
49 Sula
50 The Bluest Eye
51 The Bluest Eye
52 Love
53 Jazz
54 Jazz
55 Beloved
56 The Bluest Eye
57 Sula
58 Paradise
59 Song of Solomon
60 Jazz
61 Song of Solomon
62 The Bluest Eye