"Everything rested on Garner being alive. "All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching"
"Schoolteacher beat anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined" But she had come to believe every one of Baby Suggs' last words" that for every schoolteacher there would be an Amy that for every pupil there was a Garner, or Bodwin, or even a sheriff, whose touch at her elbow was gentle and who looked away when she nursed. This here's all there is and all there needs to be" Whatever is going on outside my door ain't for me. Sethe: "Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. It ain't right."īaby Suggs: "Was a time I knew what that was" Paul D: "You got two feet, Sethe, not four" To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom" A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. So you protected yourself and loved small. "Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon-there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. Look like I loved em more after I got here. "I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. "So Denver took her mother's milk right along with the blood of her sister"
Anything dead coming back to life hurts free#
"What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world" "Freeing yourself is one thing claiming ownership of that freed self was another"īeloved: "I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name" 'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh flesh that weeps, laughs flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Regarding Baby Suggs: "She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. Regarding Baby Suggs: "Because slave life had 'busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,' she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart-which she put to work at Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day" "But brain was not interested in the future. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit everything, just a littleīit, 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" "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 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one" "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. It's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world".ĭenver: "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies." Sethe: "It's so hard for me to believe in. Regarding Baby Suggs: "Nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children."Īmy: "Anything dead coming back to life hurts"
But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Paul D: "Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard." Page numbers refer to the Alfred A Knopf Edition (1987).: The following quotes are relevant to theme and character development.
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