Mama Day Quotes
"Everything about those types of places was a little more or less than they should have been."
"Especially when the bill came glued to the bottom of your dessert plate—who would want to ask for a second cup of coffee and have to sit there watching a big greasy thumbprint spread slowly over the Thank You printed on the back?"
"The way a man chews can tell you loads about the kind of lover he’ll turn out to be."
"Misery loves company, and that’s exactly what I was searching for on the streets during that crushing August in New York."
"When your unemployment checks have a remaining life span that’s shorter than a tsetse fly’s, and you know that temp agencies are barely going to pay your rent."
"There’s something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time."
"But it took me a while to figure out that New York racism moved underground like most of the people did."
"You have no mothers or fathers. This is not your home. And it is not a prison—it is a state shelter for boys."
"It only takes time for a man to grow older, but how many of them grow up?"
"You either do or you don’t. And you, Ophelia, were the don’t."
"I can pick out which ladies in the audience have secretly given up their babies for adoption."
"But pure black woulda sucked it all in—and it’s only an ancient mother of pure black that one day spits out this kinda gold."
"Meeting his type always made me ashamed to be a Republican."
"A gargoyle, that’s what he looked like when he leered."
"The mind is everything. What you think you become."
"I hadn’t done you a favor. I hadn’t felt sorry for a black woman out there up against it looking for a job."
"You’re working, ain’t you? So now you can stop calling collect."
"Living without manners in this world is not living at all."
"Anything that gave me pleasure wasn’t a waste of time."
"The only damage would have been done to a kindness."
"I knew beforehand that any conversation about your job with Hopewell had to be ruled out because I didn’t want you to think that I was there to pump you for information or to curry favors."
"You often arrived young and sometimes grew old, making your own small town among us."
"It’s a question that implies you think I’m shallow and a bigot."
"You just hadn’t met a man who wanted absolutely nothing from you but honesty."
"I guess the way I talk is my way of coming to terms with never knowing what to expect from anything or anybody."
"And it wasn’t good to run up against her too much."
"I guess, in a funny kind of a way, together they were the perfect mother."
"I don’t care if he did write about Othello, Cleopatra, and some slave on a Caribbean island."
"You were going to be a two-minute debt paid to my upbringing and a two-second dismissal with a 'No, I’ll call you for a rain check.'"
"The mind is a funny thing, Abigail—and a powerful thing at that."
"Sometimes He’s gotta look a little lower than other times."
"You were Harold Robbins in general and James Michener when you wanted to get deep."
"I was someone, and there was always something to do with me."
"When you finally rounded the corner after my half-hour wait, my heart started to beat just a tiny bit faster."
"There are some times in your life when you have to call upon the best of all God gave you—and the best of what He didn’t."
"Cool comes with the cultural territory: the beating of the bush drum, the rocking of the slave ship, the rhythm of the hand going from cotton sack to cotton row and back again."
"A real lady never has to get mad—if she knows how to get even."
"The island got spit out from the mouth of God, and when it fell to the earth it brought along an army of stars."
"Life is strange. Still, something like this happens and it kinda knocks you for a loop."
"The past was gone, just as gone as it could be. And only God could change the future."
"Living with a female: a day-to-day balancing act, and I really enjoyed the challenge."
"There is a spectrum of women and personalities that can make one man happy."
"You start out feeling a little uncomfortable, but then when you look around that’s the shape you’ve grown into."
"Living in a place like Willow Springs, it’s sorta easy to forget about time."
"Reality was the unshaven face in my mirror, the sound of your running water in the coffee pot, and where was the calendar to explain that when I woke up yesterday—yes, yesterday—it was the first time and now it was the fifteen hundredth?"
"Get through the eternity of the longest day and you’ve gotten through them all."
"But a little drama was in order for the occasion."
"I understood then how couples lasted forty, fifty years."
"A comfortable form of possessiveness. Only I owned the codes to a certain turn of her head, a slight narrowing of her eyes, the varying textures of her silences."
"We needed words less and less as time went on."
"The life without you resided only in my memory, and the more time we built up, the more distant that memory would become."
"Time don’t crawl and time don’t fly; time is still. You do with it what you want: roll it up, stretch it out, or here we just let it lie."
"God don’t like ugly, but He must have found something worth saving in her ’cause the child was gonna make it."
"A man should have starch in him, especially a colored man. There’s too much out there to mow him down permanent if he ain’t got the where-with-all to spring back."
"Sometimes the pain just got too much for the mind, the struggling got too much, the being tired of being tired. But in the end—the very end—you do give up the ghost, it ain’t taken away."
"A woman shouldn’t have to fight her man to be what she was; he should be fighting that battle for her."
"Naw, all them fancy tortures she was visualizing to get back at Buzzard would probably only amount to her letting all the air out of his tires or sneaking over to the south woods and throwing potash into his still."
"Ain’t her rag rugs been warping and the chairs been creaking? Ain’t she been listening to crickets trying to tear their legs off for nights on end? Listening without hearing."
"You could take the ignorant and turn it into the sublime."
"It’s the last you or Hector is getting from me."
"It ain’t happy in the world all by itself. It gets real lonely without its twin brother—thank you."
"You done called other people awful things, right in that very room. Called somebody an overbearing, domineering old woman, and that somebody didn’t stop talking to you for the rest of your life."
"A good woman is worth two good men any day when she puts her mind to it."
"If you care about someone enough, you give ’em a chance to take back the things they may have said in anger."
"You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that."
"But who asked her for it? Who made her God?"
"There is things you can do and things you can’t."
"But the winds coming around the corner of that tiny house on that tiny island was God."
"Every thought, ambition, or worry diminished as it became my being against the being on the other side of two inches of wood."
"A house is a house, ain’t it? Wood and plaster and brick. It’s the people that brings the sorrow. Or the hope."
"A gift is something that’s given, not demanded."
"Time, for its own sake, was never a major factor here. The crops, the weather, the seasons—they all controlled behavior much more than your elaborate digital watch."
"Whatever I saw, I saw. And if it was a monster reflected back at me, I was still going to stand there and face it. Hallucinations are simply not real."
"Trust only your natural eyesight. Only what you literally see is real."
"It wasn't with the realization that they were spreading so rapidly because they were actually feeding on me, the putrid odor of decaying matter that I could taste on my tongue and smell with every breath I took."
"What scared me was that you might know it was some terrible illness; and if that was, indeed, the case, why weren’t you sharing it with me?"
"It must be something very serious to keep you awake like that."
"I watched you get up and uncover the mirror. And you just stood there, staring at yourself—thinking what?"
"It was an issue of priorities. I’m getting up at daybreak, I thought, and I’m going to repair that boat."
"Miranda opens door upon door upon door. She asks each door the same thing: Tell me your name."
"Daughter. The word comes to cradle what has gone past weariness."
"She sleeps within her sleep. To wake from one is to be given back ears as the steady heart tells her—look past the pain."