Sula

by Toni Morrison

What is friendship between women when unmediated by men?

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.

Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.

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.

They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four leaf-locked trees which promised cooling, they flung themselves into the four-cornered shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly.

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

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

Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.” Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn’t last. One day she wouldn’t even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.

The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow.

She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence.

For the mouths of her children quickly forgot the taste of her nipples, and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky.