Toni Morrison

They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, for she considered love a serious disability.

Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "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."

THERE IS a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin.
Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down.
It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

Nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope.

"It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

"Don't worry about her. She's a charmed child. From the beginning."

"Is that right?"

"Uh huh. Nothing bad can happen to her. Look at it. Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver.

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one. "Why?" he asked her. "Why you think you have to take up for her? Apologize for her? She's grown."

"I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.

A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing."