Tar Baby Quotes
"All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest."
"The relationship between grandmother and child usually surfaces as a warm and satisfying one."
"Like the greedy child who can't get close enough to the radio, I want it all to myself."
"Their judgment of my interpretation is critical."
"I need to use everything—sound, image, performance—to get at the full meaning of the story."
"Once upon a time there was this farmer. He planted himself a garden…"
"The inventive farmer has succeeded but gets involved in a form of punishment, and having understood motivation so well earlier, now misunderstands completely."
"Constructed by the farmer to foil and entrap, it moves beyond trickery to art."
"The novel merged the primal and the contemporary, lore and reality."
"I thought she wanted to run, to get away from this stupid grandchild who was awed by her assignment and inadequate to the task."
"You really are beautiful," as if it could have been fake like the float but wasn’t. "Is that enough?" she asked, and it was the first honest response she had ever made to a male compliment. "Beauty is never enough," he said. "But you are."
"She was going up or down stairs; other people seemed to be settled somewhere."
"The safety she heard in his voice was in his nice square fingernails too."
"I have come full circle, Ma, thought Margaret."
"She loved him even then. But no one would believe it."
"The most beautiful, the brightest boy in the land."
"You should have mentioned it to me. I wanted that summer to be an especially pleasant one for you."
"Such tranquillity in sleep made for wildness during the waking hours."
"I'm not arguing for him. I told you last night what I thought about it. I just want to calm you down."
"He shut his ears and tried to finish his coffee submitting to the shoulder jabs out of deference to her because she was his mother’s baby sister."
"No matter what the weather I got to drown myself to get there."
"They race each other, and for sport they sleep with the swamp women in Sein de Veilles."
"It was knife hard and everybody frowned and screamed all the time."
"Every corner was a possibility and a dead end."
"I was in a little trouble back in the States too. I’m, you know, just out here trying to hang in."
"Most never make it. Some try, but most don’t choose it."
"I was as near to crying as I’d been since I’d fled from home."
"Not as grand, I suppose, as where you sleep." "Too grand," he said. "Much too grand for me. I feel out of place there."
"You went off with Yardman yesterday?" "Yes, ma'am," he said. "Mr. Street told me to."
"What line of work you in?" "I've been at sea off and on for eight years. All over. Dry cargo mostly. Wrecks."
"You should put banana leaves in your shoes. Better’n Dr. Scholl’s."
"I used to want to go down in blue water, down, down, then to rise and burst from the waves to see before him a single hard surface, a heavy thing, but intricate."
"I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other."
"I didn’t want to see your legs folded up like that. I wanted you relaxed, like you were before. You were sassy before and rubbing your ankles with your hands."
"I didn’t mean to scare you. Honest. I can live without a lot of things, but I didn’t want you to take your feet away from me just because I didn’t go to jail like I was supposed to."
"I just don’t want you upset or worried. I didn’t come here for no harm."
"It’s not about apples, Mrs. Street. I just think we should have been informed. We would have let them go ourselves, probably. This way, well..."
"At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."
"An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy."
"We’re living in other people’s space. This is not our crib. Let’s go someplace else."
"I can’t work someplace else. You can, but I can’t."
"What the hell do you do that’s so jive you can’t take it out of the city and do it there?"
"I’ve lived all over the world, Jadine. I can live anywhere."
"I want to live, not change. I can’t live just for this goddamn city."
"Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom."
"No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence."
"That is all the power there is or ever will be and I don’t want any of it."
"It took all the grown-up strength you had to stay there and stay alive and keep a family together."
"People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them."
"If you have a white man’s baby, you have chosen to be just another mammy."
"I can do anything! Anything! But I’ll be goddamn if I’ll do that!"
"I am twenty-five and this feeling is too old for me."
"There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do."
"Your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it."
"You don’t need your own natural mother to be a daughter."
"A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her."
"Every orphan knew that and knew also that mothers however beautiful were not fair."
"The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males."
"She may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish?"
"The sea was very still as in a lagoon or a cove."
"Forget her. There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties."