All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to wh — Toni Morrison

"Except for an occasional request for color she said practically nothing — until the afternoon of the last day of her life when she got out of bed, skipped slowly to the door of the keeping room and announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson se had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. "They dont know when to stop," she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever."

"It would seem that to continue to see race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained. Which may explain in part why in 1975 we are left with pretty much the same mental equipment we had in 1775 — the equipment that hadn’t the curiosity to record the names of human beings in a ship’s manifest, hasn’t the curiosity to examine the medieval minds of scientific racists, theologic [sic] racists, historical racists, literary racists; an intelligence that is so crippled that it could in all seriousness ask W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1905, in pursuit of some study as a White professor from Clark University did, whether colored people shed tears."

"Darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slating shelves, the pallet interfering with each step. If she trumbles, she is not aware of it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold."

"Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him. They were always women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved; they believed that the world itself was off balance when it appeared as though they were not loved. Why did they think they were so lovable? Why did they think their brand of love was better than, or even as good as, anybody elses? But they did. And they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way."

"When he stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs, nausea was first, then repulsion. He, he. He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plum trees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a doves breast before its heart stopped beating. Because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still of six hours in a dry well while night dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, just so the roasters would know what a man was like. And it was he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124 — shame."

"At some point in life the worlds beauty becomes enough. You dont need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you dont need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can."