Nella Larsen > Quotes

“The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it”
― Nella Larsen

“It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I'm not such an idiot that I don't realize that if a man calls me a nigger it's his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to and hold for definite examination, became almost intolerable. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“And yet she hadn't the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. ”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“To each his own milieu. Enhance what was already in one's possession.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for colored.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Her reason partly agreed, her instinct wholly rebelled.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,” Irene demanded, “how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I'm human like everybody else. It's just that I'm so tired, so worn out, I can't feel anymore.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much driving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?
Irene didn't know, couldn't decide, though for a long time she sat questioning and trying to understand. Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feelings of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don't seem to suspect it”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Money's awfully nice to have. In
fact, all things considered, I think, 'Rene, that
it's even worth the price.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Incited. That was it, the guidingprinciple of her life in Copenhagen. She was incited to make an impression, a voluptous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand