| Favorite Quotes from Sula by Toni Morrison: "When he left in November, Eva had $1.65, five eggs, three beets, and no idea of what or how to feel"(32). "Well, don't let your mouth start nothing that your ass can't stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you." "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself." "Selfish. Ain't no woman got no business floatin' around without no man"(92). "Even Nel's love for Jude, which over the years had spun a steady gray web around her heart, became a bright and easy affection, a playfulness that was reflected in their lovemaking"(95). Sula's thoughts on sex: "Lovemaking seemed to her, at first, the creation of a special kind of joy. She thought she liked the sootiness of sex and its comedy; she laughed a great deal during the raucous beginnings, and rejected those lovers who regarded sex as healthy or beautiful"(122). "How high she was over his wand-lean body, how slippery was his sliding sliding smile"(130). "Ajax blinked. Then he looked swiftly into her face. In her words, in her voice, was a sound he knew well. For the first time he saw the green ribbon. He looked around and saw the gleaming kitchen and the table set for two and detected the scent of the nest. Every hackle on his body rose, and he knew that very soon she would, like all of her sisters before her, put to him the death-knell question, 'Where you been?' His eyes dimmed with a mild and momentary regret"(133). "Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence"(134). On how Sula is living her life alone versus those women with families, etc: "They are dying just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world." Nell: "Really? What you got to show for it?" Sula: "Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me." Nell: "Lonely, ain't it?" Sula: "Yes, but 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." |
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