Quotes from book

Sula

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”

“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 been gone too long, Sula.

Not too long, but maybe too far.”

“Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

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

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”

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

“It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

“Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.”

“The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.”