Ayana Mathis

“God doesn't come to sit on the porch and sip lemonade. He comes to take over.”

“Fine doesn't call before dawn.”

“Pride brought down a lot of folks. One of these days you gon' have to turn around and look at whatever it is you running from.”

“His soul was susceptible to god's whimsy, just as his body was susceptible to any opportunistic thing that might hurt it. If he'd known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.”

“Six wasn't sure religion was any more than a lot of people caught up in a collective delirium that disappeared the minute they stepped out of the church doors and onto the street.”

“I probably always will be. But I’ve been mad all my life, and I finally figured out that I couldn’t keep carrying that with me. It’s too heavy and I’m too tired. Time will take care of it, like it does everything else.”

“Hattie had never been easy to love. She was too quiet, it was impossible to know what she was thinking. And she was angry all of the time and so disdainful when her high expectations weren't met.”

“Half of what’s wrong with people today is that they ain’t got no place to go that makes them peaceful. I don’t reckon you got no place like that.”

“I have looked at my father many times and wondered how he could stand knowing he was my mother’s ruin. He was too weak to leave her. Mother should have thrown him out and saved them both, like Sissy was saving the two of us.”

“I make a point of seeing the sunset. Even if I am on duty, I go on deck to watch the sky darken into twilight. It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it.”

“I know all of her moods and the way they play across her features, but I am still awed at the configuration of lips and eyes and cheeks that make up that face that I love. Out of all of the others I could have loved. My Sissy.”

“I take in great lungfuls of air. Atom by atom, the oxygen enters my blood and pumps in waves through my veins; it is tidal, this pumping blood. My heart beats mightily. If I ran any faster, gravity would loose its claims on my ankles, and my feet would pedal into the air.”

“I wonder if the brass understands that people are getting killed.”

“I go above deck to watch the sky darken into twilight. It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it.”

“I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.”

“Bell lifted her hand to her chest. Her heart beat so quickly. She was floating out on a tide of agony, and soon she would be carried so far she'd never come back.”

“You act like your whole life was one long January afternoon." Lawrence said. "It wouldn't do any good to go around with my head in the clouds.”

“At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.”

“She wished the man outside really were Thomas, so she and Billups could again have the same enemy and the same fear.O”

“Maybe we have only a finite amount of love to give. We're born with our portion, and if we love and are not loved enough in return, it's depleted.”

“You ought to go now before she wakes up,” Hattie said. She handed her daughter to Pearl. I’m in the floor, she thought.”

“She didn’t know what to make of this sporadic urgency with him. It had confounded and humiliated her for the thirty years of their marriage. These endless pregnancies. And worse, her body’s insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life.”

“The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She’d left him with all their children. She was holding another man’s baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.”

“Hattie’s children died in the order in which they were born: first Philadelphia, then Jubilee.”

“The Lord brings us into this world naked, but I don’t suppose he means us to stay that way”

“His pain was his most precious and secret possession, and Six held on to it as fiercely as a jewel robbed from a corpse.”

“At last, her mother and sisters exited the station and came to stand next to her. “Mama,” Hattie said. “I’ll never go back. Never.”

“It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret.”

“It seemed to him that he could never get a proper grip on any of the beauty in this world.”

“...Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.”