Paradise

by Toni Morrison

A cross was no better than the bearer.

She knew, as he did, that fun-obsessed adults were clear signs of already advanced decay. Soon the whole country would be awash in toys, tone-deaf from raucous music and hollow laughter.

Nothing like other folks’ sins for distraction.

every life, don’t you know, was holy, don’t you know, in His eyesight.

past heroism was enough of a future to live by.

her voice—soft, mildly hungry. Like a kiss.

beautiful

Veuve Clicquot

hmm

discovered that her vocal cords didn’t work. That for soundmaking power she couldn’t rival the solitary windmill creaking in the field behind her.

Pallas touched her throat and made a sound like a key trying to turn in the wrong lock.

The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though she might meet herself here—an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a “cool” self—in one of this house’s many rooms.

“Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s where the blood is.”

The sky was behaving like a showgirl: exchanging its pale, melancholy mornings for sporty ribbons of color in the evening.

nice

decent women had their babies at home and saloon women delivered in hospitals),

:)

a wife of sunlight skin, a wife of racial tampering.

she wished him pleasant dreams—something to assuage the unhappiness of his days, days spent trying to please, to make up for.

I am going to have a lot of trouble keeping my heart quiet.

Did she think education was knowing just enough to get a job?

back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good!