Collected Quotes: Song of Solomon
“She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her strength life demanded of her and the humor which to live it.” — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.307 “Slave names don’t bother me; but slave status…
“She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her strength life demanded of her and the humor which to live it.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.307
“Slave names don’t bother me; but slave status does.”
— Guitar Bains – Song of Solomon – Page 160
“[Jesus,] Southerners think they own Him, but that’s because the first time they laid eyes on Him, he was strung up on a tree. They can relate to that, see. Both the stringer and the strung.”
— Guitar – Song of Solomon – Page 115
“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 336
“Pilate put her hand on Hagar’s head and trailed her fingers through her granddaughter’s soft damp wool. ‘How can he not love your hair? It’s the same hair that grows out his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out of his crotch in up his stomach. All over his chest. The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face. It’s all over his head, Hagar. It’s his hair too. He got to love it.’”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 315
“Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 306
“It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 306
“You have to know what’s wrong before you can find what’s right.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 292
“Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it , squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on-can you hear me? Pass it on!”
— Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon – Page 235
“It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.”
— Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon: Page 35
