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Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their white skin; the red gums were their own.

...[T]he more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place... It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. +

164: This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw.
...
"Thin love ain't love at all."

165: [A]nd right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet. ...How fast he had moved from his shame to hers. From his cold-house secret straight to her too-thick love.

Circling, circling, now she was gnawing something else instead of getting to the point.

Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother--a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon--everything belonged to the men who had the guns. ...So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down head twisted to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.

[W]hen I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon--there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to.

Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe.

Then there was no one, for they would not visit her while the the baby ghost filled the house, and she returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated. But now there was someone to share it, and he has beat the spirit away the very day he entered her house and no sign of it since. A blessing, but in its place he brought another kind of haunting...

I found it!!

"Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more. Lay all that mess down..."

And under her pressing fingers and the quiet, instructive voice, she would. Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where clear water rushed on below.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Two allies driven by opposing forces--one science and the unmaking of faith, the other rage and its relentless push to destroy.

"Do you think," I said slowly. "That if I allowed you to live, the Great Machine would bless us again?"

The Saint did not respond.

"It loves you, does it not?"

[He] watched his people die in piles of red, blue, and green. The last of the Eliksni were scraps of cloth alight in bright tongues of flame.

...[They] had followed the Great Machine across the universe, beseeching it to see them once more.

...Their banners would fly the symbol of the space in between.
There was no Light for the Eliksni.
Only Dusk.

It was a one room apartment above a gas station and a winter of sitting in it waiting without hope for something to happen and now a wilted tea rose sitting in Shirley's cage. Willa Moon glided around her empty glass as if it had spun her and Frank shut his eyes, unable to bear the view.

Because it wasn't just Kwami and another season of ruined crops and something that had happened a long time ago out by the canal. It was all the miles and miles of unlit land and a neon arrow above the door and a hotel that was falling down and a town that never failed to depend on the wrong crop to save it. +

...[They] waited at the railing, holding their breaths, knowing their lives were at the edge of never being the same again, and yet all the while, the moon on the surface of the water below so peaceful and still that when it got unbearable they all ran down to it, all of them shrieking and yelling and wading into the black water with their hands out, calling her name, their voices crying like lost birds in the dark.

...[M]en with no past, gentle and hollow-eyed, eager to please.

--

If I was angry at someone, he made two enemies.

And all that empty space when you went outside, all that clear, hard light that was always changing, that sagebrush always moving and talking to you, even when it was covered in snow and the wind in every direction. A power that buzzed in your ears and made you want to shout.

I legit cannot find this book. Where did it go? Where did I tidy it off to? Nowhere logical that's for damn sure.