Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Quotes (24 Quotes)

No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.

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 the right order.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved's side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe's smile.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

You your best thing, Sethe. You are.

Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.