Contact
Privacy
Book: A Mercy
Quotes of Book: A Mercy
TOP TAGS :subjective-experiencetwilight-quotefresh-startpearl-in-the-mistdejectiondescriptive-proseself-absorbedsupport

  1. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?
    book-quote

  2. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.
    book-quote

  3. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life.
    book-quotewomenreligion

  4. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.
    book-quote

  5. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.
    book-quoteslave-women

  6. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes.It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing, to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
    book-quote

  7. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles
    book-quote

  8. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.
    book-quote

  9. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.
    book-quote

  10. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?
    book-quote

  11. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.
    book-quotesolitude

  12. Toni Morrison _ A Mercy

    We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.
    book-quote
Categories