Sula

by Toni Morrison

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.

Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

An eagerness to please and an apology for living met in her voice.

that these men, unlike her father, who worshiped his graceful, beautiful wife, were bubbling with a hatred for her mother that had not been there in the beginning but had been born with the dazzling smile.

She got out of bed and lit the lamp to look in the mirror. There was her face, plain brown eyes, three braids and the nose her mother hated. She looked for a long time and suddenly a shiver ran through her. “I’m me,” she whispered. “Me.”

(Once when Hannah accused her of hating colored people, Eva said she only hated one, Hannah’s father BoyBoy, and it was hating him that kept her alive and happy.)

She too thought she would have no problem distinguishing among them, because they looked nothing alike, but like everyone else before her, she gradually found that she could not tell one from the other. The deweys would not allow it.

They wanted to see the joy in her face as they settled down to play checkers, knowing that even when she beat them, as she almost always did, somehow, in her presence, it was they who had won something.

She would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with someone implied for her a measure of trust and a definite commitment.

Everybody welcomed him and gave him a warm room next to Tar Baby’s and waited for him to tell them whatever it was he wanted them to know. They waited in vain for his telling but not long for the knowing.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.

Although both were unshaped, formless things, Nel seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.

Sula raised her eyes to them. Her voice was quiet. “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?”

feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.

“Play? Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895. Just ’cause you got it good now you think it was always this good?

what you talkin’ ’bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you

I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more. I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again.

In those days a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.

The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance.

“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full rein, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her.

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

“Why? I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?”

He had said “always” to convince her, assure her, of permanency.

“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.”