1. “Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color.”
2. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. 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.”
3. “Nothing ever dies.”
4. “He wants to put his story next to hers…’We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kinda tomorrow.”
5. “Today is always here,’ said Sethe. ‘Tomorrow, never.”
6. “The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.”
7. “Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.”
8. “you got two feet, Sethe, not four.” he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.”
9. “But now — even the daylight time that Beloved had counted on, disciplined herself to be content with, was being reduced, divided by Sethe’s willingness to pay attention to other things. Him mostly.”
10. “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.”
11. “It’s so hard for me to believe in [time]. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . . . 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 rememory, but out there, in the world”.
12. “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.”
13. “Down came the dry flakes, fat enough and heavy enough to crash like nickels on stone. It always surprised him, how quiet it was. Not like rain, but like a secret.”
14. “And if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold?”
15. “If you can’t count they can cheat you. If you can’t read they can beat you.”
16. “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”
17. “Anything dead coming back alive hurts”
18. “She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
19. “Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed.”
20. “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!”
21. “Come on, you may as well just come on.”
22. “Come see,” I was thinking. “Be the last thing you behold,”
23. “Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.”
24. “Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself, which is why Amy was all she ever asked about. The rest was a gleaming, powerful world made more so by Denver’s absence from it. Not being in it, she hated it and wanted Beloved to hate it too, although there was no chance of that at all.”
25. “I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean a thing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”
26. “They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last.”
27. “Nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”
28. “tougher, because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive.”
29. “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.”
30. “She had been so close, then closer. And it was so much better than the anger that ruled when Sethe did or thought anything that excluded herself.”
31. “When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.”
32. “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
33. “Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.”
34. “Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”
35. “Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible.”
36. “I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing”
37. “’Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.”
38. “She cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.”
39. “Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have known better. . . . Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be.”
40. “If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.”
41. “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.”
42. “The best thing she was, was her children.”
43. “And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.”
44. “lay it all down, sword and shield.”
45. “He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”
46. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”
47. “Denver looked up at her. She did not know it then, but it was the word ‘baby’, said softly with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman”
48. “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.”
49. “Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?”
50. “Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.”
51. “I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.”
52. “The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.”
53. “My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.”
54. “The disease they suffered now was a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation they remembered.”
55. “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.”
56. “She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.”
57. “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
58. “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather.”
59. “Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still. . . if her boys were gone . . .”
60. “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”
61. “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.”
62. “Was it hard? I hope she didn’t die hard.”
63. “That’s some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down.”
64. “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 once.”
65. “Even the educated colored: the long-schooled people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there.”
66. “What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”
67. “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
68. “living activity of the dead)”
69. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”
70. “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”
71. “The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there — you who never was there — if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.”
72. “Good is knowing when to stop.”
73. “A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change”
74. “They began to pilfer in earnest, and it became not only their right but their obligation.”
75. “You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.”
76. “The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
77. “Death is a skipped meal compared to this.”
78. “Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
79. “Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start that day’s serious work of beating back the past.”
80. “schoolteacher didn’t take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.”
81. “People who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”
82. “Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore.”
83. “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”
84. I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around our neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face.”
85. “It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”
86. “Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.”
87. “Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind. ”
88. “The future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”
89. “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all”
90. “‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’ she said, ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”
91. “If I’m here…you can go anywhere you want. Jump if you want to. ‘Cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall.”
92. “close to the fire you could”
93. “Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow”
94. “It’s gonna hurt, now,’ said Amy. ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
95. “He wants to put his story next to hers.”
96. “That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and”
97. “I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name.”
98. “You looking good.” “Devil’s confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.”
99. “Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.”
100. “To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The ‘better life’ she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.”
101. “How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.”
102. “Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.”
103. “It’s not about choosing somebody over her. It’s about making space for somebody along with her.”
104. “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. It scared her.”
105. “I am Beloved and she is mine.”
106. “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…”
107. “The cider jug is heavy, but it always is, even when it’s empty.”
108. “if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away”
109. “This and much more Denver heard her say from her corner chair, trying to persuade Beloved, the one and only person she felt she had to convince, that what she had done was right because it came from true love.”
110. “There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it’s a rout”
111. “No more running — from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth.”
112. “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
113. “I would have known right away who you was when the sun blotted out your face the way it did when I took you to the grape arbor. I would have known at once when my water broke. And when I did see your face it had more than a hint of what you would look like after all these years.”
114. “I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join.”
115. “so you protected yourself and loved small”
116. “And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.”
117. “There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks”
118. “Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite? . . . But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I’d love more . . . my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that.”
119. “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.”
120. “What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”
121. “Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present.”
122. “Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”
123. “Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she? Other people’s brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new…”
124. “Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite?”
125. “Something that is loved is never lost.”
126. “I don’t have to remember nothing. I don’t even have to explain. She understands it all…”
127. “She is the laugh; I am the laughter.”
128. “Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part. Sorry you missed her though. Is that what you came by for?”
129. “They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.”
130. “You can’t do that, Baby. It ain’t right.”
131. “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.”
132. “You are your best thing.”
133. “cemetery as old as sky,”
134. “The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, 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.”
135. “Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy.”
136. “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. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
137. “She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.”
138. “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.”
139. “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”
140. “She could bear the hours — nine or ten of them each day but one — when Sethe was gone. Bear even the nights when she was close but out of sight, behind walls and doors lying next to him.”
141. “The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.”
142. “Not know it was hard;knowing it was harder”
143. “Anything dead coming back alive hurts”
