The Narrows Quotes

“Sometimes I look at my own movies”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“People like to see a king uncrowned, like to see a thoroughbred racehorse beaten when he's running at the top of his form and has outrun everything in sight. They wanted to see that the king, the top dog, the best man, has a flaw, can be beaten like them, is vulnerable like them, can be defeated, unfrocked, uncrowned, knocked down, and thus brought right down to their level.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“It were purely like a snowball and everybody gave it a push...”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“You had to take the direct approach, never the indirect approach, because colored people invariably avoided unpleasantness, they would lie, they would laugh, but they never faced right up to a situation, head on.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“There aren't any easy jobs. You might as well find it out now while you're young--”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“All marriages are like this. The component parts are contempt and irritation because we know each other by heart, by rote; we're all graduates of the blab school for double harness. Then he looked at the redgold hair, the sweet curve of the mouth, and thought, Truthlie, because marriage is more than that. It's part hate, part love. It's remembered agony, and remembered delight.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“You want to be a middle peon, neither rich nor poor, and there's no such thing.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“She said, "Whoever heard of a colored historian?" Head up. Eyes flashing with anger.

He was bewildered and hurt in a funny kind of way. He had looked at her thinking, Why should you who are colored try to destroy me, discourage me, and why should the history teacher who is white, encourage me, keep telling me I can do this thing? Why do you want to hurt me? How can you say that and then turn around and quote your farther, "The black man can do anything if he sets out to do it, if he's willing to work at it, night and day, can do anything, can do anything.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“No one in the USA free-from--free from what? Leave it lie. No one in the USA free (period period).”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Back in the eighteenth century I would have been a sliver-collar boy. Did you ever hear about them? The highborn ladies of the court collected monkeys and peacocks and little blackamoors for pets. Slender young dark brown boys done up in silk with turbans wrapped around their heads and silver collars around their necks, and the name of the lady to whom they belonged was engraved on the silver collar. They were supposed to be pets like the peacocks and the monkeys, but in the old oil paintings, the lady's delicate white hand always fondled the silkclad shoulder of the silver-collar boy. So you knew they were something more useful, more serviceable--”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“She still walks as though she owned the world, and come to think of it, she does. That's why she walks like that.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Well, of course," Camilo said, and grinned back at JohnRolandJoseph and his long line of bought and paid for ancestors, as friendly and unselfconscious as though all her life she had been looking for men, black men, big black men--plantation bucks (stud) look at his thighs, look at that back, look at his dingle-dangle--as though all her life she had been looking for colored men to whom she was not married, to whom she would never be married because she was already married to a nice young white man, as though all her life she had told uniformed monkeys who pulled elevators in rundown colored hotels, in Harlem, that she couldn't find, had lost, misplaced, a gentleman of color named Williams.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“The female wasn't complicated, it was the male who was complicated. The female was simple, elemental, direct, primordial.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Doesn't the female always take what she wants and at the same time try to hang on to what she already has?”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Doris was talking about the Orwells, and J.C. was talking about his princess, and asking when the cookies would be done, and neither one was really listening to the other. That's the way all conversations, really satisfying ones, are carried on.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“J.C. said, "Miss Doris, is all printhesses white?"

"How's that?"

"Is printhesses always white?"

"I ain't seen one recently. Last one I seen was black."

"Powther say they're white."

"Who's he?"

"My daddy."

"Well," Miss Doris said, "maybe your pappy's only seen white ones. Folks only see what they want to see.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Powther, there is things about white people that I never will understand. And to tell you the God's honest truth, I don't intend to try. I am a hell of a lot more comfortable, and it gives me a lot more honest-to-God pleasure just to write 'em all down as bastards and leave 'em strictly alone. Live and let live is what I say. I don't bother them and they don't bother me, so we get along fine.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“He knew that people got accustomed to luxury very quickly, accepting it finally as their due, and no matter what strain and struggle, what utter poverty they may have known, they soon forgot it, they soon reached the point where they could not survive whole without comfort, luxury. It softened them up.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Objective about race? Hell, no. Nobody was. Not in the USA.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Abbie kept telling him all the things he could, and could not, do because of The Race. You had to be polite; you had to be punctual; you couldn't wear bright-colored clothes, or loud-colored socks; and even certain food was forbidden. Abbie said that she loved watermelons, but she would just as soon cut off her right arm as go in a store and buy one, because colored people loved watermelons. She wouldn't buy porgies because colored people loved all the coarsefleshed fish and were particularly fond of porgies. She wouldn't fry fish, she wouldn't fry chicken, because everybody knew that colored people liked fried food. She was always on time, in fact, way ahead of time, because colored people were always late, you could never count on them, they had no sense of responsibility. The funny thing about it was that when Abbie talked about The Race she sounded as though she weren't colored, and yet she obviously was.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“If Abbie knew about this, she'd say that he'd let The Race down. She said colored people (sometimes she just said The Race) had to be cleaner, smarter, thriftier, more ambitious than white people, so that white people would like colored people. The way she explained it made him feel as though he were carrying The Race around with him all the time. It kept him confused, a little frightened, too. At that moment The Race sat astride his shoulders, a weight so great that his back bent under it.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“The attendant looked at Camilo, looked at Link, blandly, incuriously. Link thought, In New York all the black boys who go in for what they like to call Caddies also go in for white girls. So this is old hat to him. He figures that if I'm rich enough--numbers or women or rackets of one kind or another--to drive one of these crates, then almost any good-looking white girl is going to find me acceptable. Money transforms the black male. Makes him beautiful in the eyes of the white female. Black and comely. No. It was black but comely, take it for granted that blackness and comeliness were not only possible but went hand in hand.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“She's scared, he thought. She's scared deaf, dumb, and blind. She thinks I'm going to rape her. I'm due to rape her, or try to, because I'm colored and it's written in the cards that colored men live for the sole purpose of raping white women, especially young beautiful white women who are on the loose.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“You've driven one of these before."

"Yeah." One of these, nice way to put it. Oh, you've held a tennis racket before, oh, you've worn shoes before, oh, you've used a toothbrush before. Bug Eyes is a weisenheimer but he was right. The lady is white. That surprised condescension in the voice is an unmistakable characteristic of the Caucasian, a special characteristic of the female Caucasian. The funny thing is they don't even know they do it.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Why did he always say, safe as a church? Who was safe in a church? Safe from what?”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“As she went toward the hall, walking briskly, she thought, I've been afraid of everything, ever since the Major died. No one has ever known how afraid I've been.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“She supposed the young colored men of Link's generation couldn't have manners like Mr. Powther's, though she didn't know why. Wars and atom bombs and the fact that there was so much hate in the world might have something to do with it. There were times when she had thought that rudeness was a characteristic of Link's; that other young men had a natural courtesy he would never have. Then she would see or hear something in The Narrows that suggested all these young men were alike--something had brutalized them. But what?”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Life is a mysterious and exciting affair and anything can be a thrill if you know how to look for it, and what to do with opportunity when it comes.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“We might have been friends, if you had had a slightly lower set of standards, if your judgements of people had been less unkind, less critical; if that outer layer of pride had not been so prickly, so impenetrable.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“They may all look alike in the fog, brother, but not under electric light.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows