Song Of Solomon Quotes
"Writing Song of Solomon destroyed all that. I had no access to what I planned to write about until my father died."
"He answered. Whatever it is called—muse, insight, inspiration, 'the dark finger that guides,' 'bright angel'—it exists and, in many forms, I have trusted it ever since."
"The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one."
"In the company of one, his firstborn, he always beamed and preferred her cooking over everyone else's, including his wife's."
"Most important, he talked to each of us in language cut to our different understandings."
"I think it was because I felt closer to him than to myself that, after his death, I deliberately sought his advice for writing the novel that continued to elude me."
"Opening the novel with the suicidal leap of the insurance agent, ending it with the protagonist's confrontational soar into danger, was meant to enclose the mystical but problematic one taken by the Solomon of the title."
"You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers."
"He could go on and die up there if he wants to. But if he don’t toss me my rent, I’m going to blow him out of that window."
"I felt it all over again. So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn’t fall."
"I don’t let it get warm because the egg is room temperature, you see. Now then, the real secret is right here in the boiling."
"That woman’s no good. She’s a snake, and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake."
"Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too."
"The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger."
"The only way I’ll go to that nigger heaven is with a case of dynamite and a book of matches."
"But if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn’t be selfish with somebody you loved."
"The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things."
"As he stood there, mindlessly watching her, tulips began to grow out of the holes she had dug."
"The flowers grew and grew, until he could see only her shoulders above them and her flailing arms high above those bobbing, snapping heads."
"Milkman thought she would jump up in fear—at least surprise. But she didn’t."
"He tried to be as light-hearted as possible in the telling, but at the end, Guitar looked him in the eyes and said, 'Why didn’t you go help her?'"
"It was that atmosphere of earnestness he provoked that led Milkman to talking about his family more than he would normally do."
"There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, inconvenience himself for."
"No one had ever denied him any, so it had no exotic attraction."
"The wind howled outside in the blackness and Freddie, looking like a gnome, flashed his gold teeth."
"People die when they want to and if they want to. Don’t nobody have to die if they don’t want to."
"Ruth was sixty-two years old. Lena had no idea she could move that fast."
"A human life is precious. You shouldn’t fly off and leave it."
"Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours."
"You can’t take a life and walk off and leave it."
"If you take a life, then you own it. You're responsible for it."
"You can’t get rid of nobody by killing them. They still there, and they yours now."
"You could’ve taken him and his wheelchair and put him in a small dusty town in Alabama and given him some tobacco, a checkerboard, some whiskey, and a rope and he’d have done it too."
"What I’m saying is, under certain conditions they would all do it."
"The earth is soggy with black people’s blood. And before us Indian blood."
"Nothing can cure them, and if it keeps on there won’t be any of us left and there won’t be any land for those who are left."
"It’s about trying to make a world where one day white people will think before they lynch."
"The fact was he wanted the gold because it was gold and he wanted to own it. Free."
"They lived here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else!"
"The dead don’t like it if they’re not buried. They don’t like it at all."
"You don’t listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it’s not connected to your brain."
"What’s a matter? Y’all get your wires crossed?"
"Wish mine was here. Been waitin fifty-seven years and it ain’t come yet."
"She killed herself rather than do the work I’d been doing all my life!"
"You think I don’t know how to walk when I want to walk?"
"Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain?"
"You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own."
"You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless."
"It’s the same hair that grows out of his own armpits."
"He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them 'them,' and would certainly despise their days."
"The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face."
"The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note."
"Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn’t even know your name scrubbed your back."
"Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?"
"When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do."
"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."
"Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly."
"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."