Jazz

by Toni Morrison

the children of suicides are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are not really here.

A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.

I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like

Nobody wants to be an emergency at Harlem Hospital but if the Negro surgeon is visiting, pride cuts down the pain.

By the way his jaw moves and the turn of his head I know he has a golden tongue.

it’s hard to match the superstitious for great expectations.

Sixty years, forty, even, is as much as anybody feels like being bothered with.

An inward face—whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.

“Men wear you down to a sharp piece of gristle if you let them.”

“Now I reckon you going to tell me some old hateful story about how a young girl messed over you and how he’s not to blame because he was just walking down the street minding his own business, when this little twat jumped on his back and dragged him off to her bed. Save your breath. You’ll need it on your deathbed.”

This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down.

This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down.

Words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment.

Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgusts, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

such a citysky presses and retreats, presses and retreats, making me think of the free but illegal love of sweethearts before they are discovered.

Looking at it, this nightsky booming over a glittering city, it’s possible for me to avoid dreaming of what I know is in the ocean, and the bays and tributaries it feeds: the two-seat aeroplanes, nose down in the muck, pilot and passenger staring at schools of passing bluefish; money, soaked and salty in canvas bags, or waving their edges gently from metal bands made to hold them forever.

The rope broke then, disturbing her peace, making her aware of flesh and something so free she could smell its bloodsmell; made her aware of its life below the sash and its red lip rouge.

woman called Violent

Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.