Collected Book Quotes From: Sula
“[…] 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.” — Sula Peace – Sula: Page 143 “The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.” — Toni Morrison – Sula –…
“[…] 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.”
— Sula Peace – Sula: Page 143
“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”
— Toni Morrison – Sula – Page 118
“I mean, I don’t know what the fuss is about. I mean everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. […] Now ain’t that love? […] Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children-white and black, boys and girls-spend all their childhood eating their hearts out ‘cause they think you don’t love them. And if that ain’t enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man like another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from one another a whole day. So […] it looks to me you the envy of the world.”
— Sula Peace – Sula – Page 103-104
“[…] the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.”
— Toni Morrison – Sula – Page 65
“Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”
— Sula Peace – Sula: Page 144-145
“The men who took her […] places had merged into one large personality: the same language of love, the same entertainment of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings or goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her awhile to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be-for a woman. And that no one would ever be the at versions of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand.”
— Toni Morrison – Sula: Page 120-121
“They could not let that heart-smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.”
— Nel – Sula – Page 107
“If folks let somebody know where they is and when they coming, then other folks can get ready for them. If they don’t-if they just pop in all sudden like-then they got to take whatever mood they find,”
— Eva Peace – Sula – Page 91-92
“What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or ever generosity was in fact full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal-for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental-life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew-only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as “natural” as springtime. […] The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance.”
— Toni Morrison – Sula – Page 90
“I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more. I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again.”
— Eva Peace – Sula – Page 71
