Summer Reading: Post 1 - Beloved

One of my plans for this summer is to catch up reading books I (somehow) missed despite receiving a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature.  Though I don't want to make a rigorous schedule (like a job) for myself now that I've got some free time, I do want to check off some books that I've been somewhat ashamed to say I haven't read.  I'll be adding to my list as the summer goes on and hopefully I'll stay motivated to keep it up.  Most of the books I already own; I've been collecting them from book sales and clearance bins, hoping to get around to it.  I graduated from my Masters' program going on two weeks now and I'm only working a part-time job this summer (along with applying to new ones) so I figure now's a better time than ever to catch up!

To keep myself (and this blog) going I thought I'd post a few reactions or maybe just some quotes I found interesting while reading these summer books (I am on break after all), and to kick it off I've pulled quotes from the first two on my list: Toni Morrison's Beloved and Elie Wiesel's Night (Post 2).

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Though I've heard numerous conference papers on Beloved and others of Morrison's books I had yet to read any before this past week.  I already owned it and even attempted reading it once in undergrad, obviously unsuccessfully.  But this time as soon as I started I couldn't put it down.

Toni Morrison - source

"To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.  The 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one . . . As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered" (42).


"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" (45).


"'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'" (45).


And perhaps my favorite parts were the descriptions of Baby Suggs, holy . . .
"In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.  She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.  She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.  She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.  That if they could not see it, they would not have it.


'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard . . . Move than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  For this is the prize'" (88-9).


"[The voices] had become an occasional mutter - like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens.  Nothing fierce or startling.  Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks" (172).


"Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined" (190).


"Grandma Baby said people look down on her because . . . [s]laves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them.  Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down. She said for me not listen to all that.  That I should always listen to my body and love it" (209).


". . . we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow" (273).