The Salt Eaters Quotes

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
― Toni Cade Bambara , The Salt Eaters

“I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,' he told himself. 'Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master's Mind,' he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player--that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.”

Excerpt From: Toni Cade Bambara. “The Salt Eaters.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Two hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there’s you. What’s your story?”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Cause love won’t let you let’m go.” “But they want to go, that’s the hurting part.” “Like you tole the lap sitter this morning, Min, when you hurt, hurt. But when you see the chirren calling down thunder and going up in flames, Min. Why then you snatch you a blanket”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“She wasn’t meant for these scenes, wasn’t meant to be sitting up there in the Southwest Community Infirmary with her ass out, in the middle of the day, and strangers cluttering up the treatment room, ogling her in her misery. She wasn’t meant for any of it. But then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“The reliability of stools? Solids, liquids, gases, the dance of atoms, the bounce and race of molecules, ethers, electrical charges. The eyes and habits of illusion. Retinal images, bogus images, traveling to the brain. The pupils trying to tell the truth to the inner eye. The eye of the heart. The eye of the head. The eye of the mind. All seeing differently.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“And she wanted to answer Ruby, wanted to say something intelligible and calm and hip and funny so the work could take precedence again. But the words got caught in the grind of her back teeth as she shred silk and canvas and paper and hair. The rip and shriek of silk prying her teeth apart. And it all came out a growling.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“The cars pulling up alongside a woman or a kid ready to sell the self for a Twinkie. Bringing down a bird or a woman or a man stalked at a dance. Taking over a life. That was not hunting as the sisters explained it, sang it, acted it out. To have dominion was not to knock out, downpress, bruise, but to understand, to love, make at home. The keeping in the sights the animal, or child, man or woman, tracking it in order to learn their way of being in the world. To be at home in the knowing. The hunt for balance and kinship was the thing. A mutual courtesy.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Maybe … an old story passed down on Mai’s maternal side huddled together in the internment camps of ’42, keeping themselves alive with the stories. But keeping separate even then, even there, the threads of the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino elders. Stories keeping the people in the camps alive while the bill in Congress to sterilize the women of the camps got voted down by one vote, one vote. And then the silence. A whole generation silent”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“He headed in the general direction of the treatment room, feeling that familiar wave of energy surge through him. In another minute, he sensed, he would generate enough energy to found a dynasty, lift a truck, start a war, light up the whole of Clayborne for a week. “I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,” he told himself. “Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant. I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master’s Mind,” he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player—that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“No one remarked on any of this or on any of the other remarkable things each sensed but had no habit of language for, though felt often and deeply, privately.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Anywhere at all in the universe, but I choose to be here with this growler scowler. And good ain’t the key. It’s just that I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Learning still, Old Wife, learning still.” “But ain’t learned to quit casting a voluptuous eye on the young mens, I notice,” chirping her teeth. “When you gonna learn, you ole stick in the mud, that ‘good’ ain’t got nothing to do with it? They packed me off to seminary thinking helping and healing and nosing around was about being good. It was only that I was … available.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“But she would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters