From "Sula"
“He saw a window that looked out on a river which he knew was full of fish. Someone was speaking softly just outside the door...”
“Two men were going up the steps. Then he noticed that there were many people about, and that he was just now seeing them, or else they had just materialized.”
“Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn’t even know who he was...with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do...he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the door...”
“There in the toiler water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unquivocal, it astonished him. He had been harboring a skirtish apprehension that he was not real--that he didn’t exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. In his joy he took the risk of letting one edge of the blanket drop and glanced at his hands. They were still. Courteously still.”
“He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.”
“...but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel somthing about the dead. They could not let that heart smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste.”
“Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter.
The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula’s palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing. Both girls stared at the water.”
“When the girls were three feet in front of the boys, Sula reached out into her coat pocket and pulled out Eva’s paring knife. The boys stopped short, exchanged looks and dropped all pretense of innocence. This was going to be better than they thought. They were going to try to fight back, and with a knife. Maybe they could get an arm around one of their waists, or tear...
Sula squatted down in the dirt road and put everything down on the ground: her lunchpail, her reader, her mittens, her slate. Holding the knife in her right hand, she pulled the slate toward her and pressed her left forefinger down hard on its edge. Her aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate.
Sula raised her eyes to them. Her voice was quiet. ‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you ?’ “
“Pain was greedy; it demanded her attention.”
“While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped breathing, that t her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a vioent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.
Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.”
“They did not believe death was accidental--life might be, but death was deliberate.”
“They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide--it was beneath them.”
“Maybe just a brief moment, for once, of not feeling fear, of looking at death in the sunshine and being unafraid. She laughed.”
“Lord, how time flies. She hardly recognized anybody in the town any more. Now there was another old people’s home. Look like the town just kept on building homes for old people. Every time they built a road they built a old folks’ home. You’d think folks was living longer, but the fact of it was, they was being put out faster.”
“With the same disregard for name changes by marriage that the black people of Medallion always showed, each flat slab had one word carved on it. Together they read like a chant: PEACE 1895-1921, PEACE 1890-1923, PEACE 1910-1940, PEACE 1892-1959.
They were not dead people. They were words. Not even words. Wishes, longings.”
“He said he knew she was dead right away not because her eyes were open but her mouth was. It looked to him like a giant yawn that never got to finish ........... The night slipped into another day and the body was still lying in Eva’s bed gazing at the ceiling trying to complete a yawn.”
“Shadrack and Nel moved in opposite directions, each thinking separate thoughts about the past. The distance between them increased as they both remembered gone things.”
....... & the very last line of the book:
“It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
