Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘ ‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

...the change was adjustment without improvement.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Love is divine only and difficult always.

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

You got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.

You your best thing, Sethe. You are.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

How come it can't fly no better than a chicken?" "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

The loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.