Chloe’s Reviews > Beloved > Status Update

“There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle;it’s a rout.”

“Denver, who thought she knew all about silence, was surprised to learn hunger could do that: quiet you down and wear you out. Neither Sethe nor Beloved knew or cared about it one way or another. They were too busy rationing their strength to fight each other. So it was she who had to step off the edge of the world and die because if she didn’t, they all would.”

“Too rough for him to listen to. Too thick, he said. My love was too thick. What he know about it? Who in the world is he willing to die for?”

“She didn’t want to jostle them or be jostled by them. Feel their judgment or their pity, especially now.”

i enjoy how even with the magical realism of toni morrisons telling she rejects artifice, there is real pain in her writing and also beauty. whereas the books that don’t reveal the ‘dirt’ of the circumstances of oppression don’t do the people oppressed any justice or the readers an ability to access an empathy outside of their sphere of experience and comfort (which is the only kind worth engaging)

she’s exceptional in every way like how do you even cultivate this level of insight and articulation

“The coldness of the gesture—its sign that he was indeed a stranger at the gate—overwhelmed him. Retracing his steps in the snow, he sighed. Spirit willing; flesh weak.”

“And no, the ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. ‘You’ gotta love it.”

“To invite readers and myself into the repellant landscape (hidden but not completely;deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts”

toni morrison how i adore you