Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”

Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

You can’t do the past over.

in Mary’s the lights made everybody beautiful, or if not beautiful, then fascinating.

He thinks if a paper clip is in the wrong drawer, I should apologize.

They excused themselves for everything. Every job of work undone, every bill unpaid, every illness, every death was The Man’s fault.

Even a traveling side show would have rejected her, since her freak quality lacked that important ingredient—the grotesque. There was really nothing to see.

Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

You can’t take a life and walk off and leave it.

But isn't that what Guitar is doing?

My name’s Macon; I’m already dead.

You have to know what’s wrong before you can find what’s right.”

Just long enough for the heart of each man to adjust its throb to the downbeat of the other.

Never mind that he probably didn’t deserve their honor–they knew what kind of man he was: arrogant, color-struck, snobbish. They didn’t care about that. They were paying their respect to whatever it was that made him be a doctor in the first place, when the odds were that he’d be a yardman all of his life.

Is this why we respect presidents, celebrities, authors and athletes when their morals are questionable? We respect how they made something of themselves, when circumstances stood in their way at every turn.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?