The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories
Nella Larsen
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”
“What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”
“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. ”
“She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.”
“Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals.”
“No, certainly he didn’t. Not actually. He couldn’t, not very well, since he didn’t know. But he would have. It amounts to the same thing. And I’m sure it was just as unpleasant.”
“How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch.”
“What right, she kept demanding of herself, had Clare Kendry to expose her, or even Gertrude Martin, to such humiliation, such downright insult?”
“The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy, of God.”
“The chagrin which she had felt at her first failure to subvert this latest manifestation of his discontent had receded, leaving in its wake an uneasy depression. Were all her efforts, all her labors, to make up to him that one loss, all her silent striving to prove to him that her way had been best, all her ministrations to him, all her outward sinking of self, to count for nothing in some unperceived sudden moment? And if so, what, then, would be the consequences to the boys? To her? To Brian himself? Endless searching had brought no answer to these questions. There was only an intense weariness from their shuttlelike procession in her brain.”
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Book Keywords:
arrogance, mothers, irritation, personality, blacks, children, standoffishness, racism, self-sufficiency, race-relations, sensitivity, friends, motherhood, race, african-americans, sociability
