Beloved

Toni Morrison

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Important Quotations Explained

1. 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.


2. White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.


3. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.


4. . . . [I]f you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you . . . [E]ven though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.


5. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe.


The role of water in a scene of Beloved

by stewi87, July 13, 2012

The scene treated in this analysis is from Toni Morrison's Beloved. It is situated where Paul D, a former slave is captured and deported together with forty-fife other prisoners and where they successfully manage to escape. All quotations will be from the following scene :

It rained.
Snakes came down from short-leaf pine and hemlock.
It rained.
Cypress, yellow poplar, ash and palmetto drooped under five days of rain without wind. By the eighth day the doves were nowhere in sight, by the ninth even the salamanders wer

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