Emma > Recent Status Updates

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?” (364-365)

“Comma was always directed at third parties, at those who felt comfortable with the current distribution of money and medicine in the world. And the implication, of course, was that you weren’t one of those. Were you?” (24).

Blessing is that as we find ourselves in a place that God has yet to explain, may never explain, a place or life that doesn’t line up with what we had in mind, He gives us a promise like He gave to Abraham. It is the promise of Emmanuel, God with us. He will be here with us, our reward” (23).

The conversation between Celie and Shug on pages 192-197 - wow. One of the most profound things I’ve read in this book. They’re wrestling with who God is and pushing against what white patriarchal church and society has told them about Him (as Black women). I admittedly didn’t expect Shug to have such wisdom to share.

“‘Hard times’ is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa’s ‘hard times’ were made harder by them. Millions and millions of Africans were captured and sold into slavery—you and me, Celie!…Why did they sell us? How could they have done it? And why do we still love them?” (139).

I love Nettie’s insights in this book.

“A colored person couldn’t survive in the white man’s world being ignorant. They had to know the news.” (83)

Wow, this book. It shows how enslaved people might escape a plantation only to be put under new oppressive systems. They’re treated as some sort of curiosity or experiment, not autonomous human beings. Also, Cora’s job at the museum is so angering 🙄

“Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach” (119).

“Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn’t look like it. When it was a dream of new shoes” (57).

“Fear was already in pursuit, as it had been every day on the plantation, and it matched their pace” (55).

So well-written!!

“By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without” (28).

“Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude” (29).

“And before the slave part of her caught up with the human part of her…” (34).

“Sometimes she cries because things are so beautiful and we keep messing them up. Because the world doesn’t have to be so terrifying. That’s on people, not the world.” (192)

I really thought I’d like this book but I think I might put it down…beautifully written but the emotion is just too heavy for me right now. Maybe I’ll come back to it.