Beloved

They were not holding hands, but their shadows were

There's a carnival in town. Thursday, tomorrow, is for coloreds and I got two dollars.

Me and you and Denver gonna spend every penny of it. What you say?"

"No" is what she said. At least what she started out saying (what would her boss say if she took a day off?), but even when she said it she was thinking how much her eyes enjoyed looking in his face.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one. "Why?" he asked her. "Why you think you have to take up for her? Apologize for her? She's grown."

"I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.

A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing."

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

"Don't worry about her. She's a charmed child. From the beginning."

"Is that right?"

"Uh huh. Nothing bad can happen to her. Look at it. Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

"It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

Nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope.

who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead