Taylor

“Yet Alice Manfred swore she heard a complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction. But the part she hated most was its appetite. Its longing for the bash, the slit; a kind of careless hunger for a fight or a red ruby stickpin for a tie--either would do. It faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel generous, this juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music. It made her hold her hand in the pocket of her apron to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did and did to her and everybody else she knew or knew about. Better to close the windows and the shutters, sweat in the summer heat of a silent Clifton Place apartment than to risk a broken window or a yelping that might not know how or where to stop.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“They were never interested in how I made my food, or the stories behind how I learned. Like how my mama would sing to her gravy to make it thicken, or how she showed me that bacon fat would make butter taste like a heaven no one had ever dreamed of. Or how cornmeal was better than flour because it had weight, and having weight is how you know your worth, so don't let anyone tell you different.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

“Thank God for life," True Belle said, "and thank life for death.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“We can’t read water in the same way as we can’t read data…Working with it makes us more aware of the distance between ourselves and the matter under consideration: it reminds us that we share this world rather than own it. Knowledge produced through the medium of the shifting surface of a bucket of water is made in cooperation with the world, rather than by conquering it.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence