Gloria Naylor Quotes

The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.

Life's too short to spend time trying to explain the obvious to an idiot.

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.

I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself.

Now that she had actually seen and accepted reality, and reality brought such a healing calm.

Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

3)"One man's weed is another man's flower." (115).

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days.

You can lose a lot when you travel too much.

We all don't have to see eye to eye in order to see our way to the Kingdom. It's the heart condition of each man that the Lord will judge.

1) "school isn't where the real learning happens." (3).

There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.

Like they say, it takes all types to make the world. But sometimes you wish it didn't.

When you raise a god instead of a child, you're bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god.

2)"Even though this planet is round, there are just too many spots where you can find yourself hanging on to the edge just like I was; and unless there's some space, some place, to take a breather for awhile, the edge of the world- frightening as it is- could be the end of the world, which would be quite a pity." (28).

Contempt mates well with pity.

He holds his glass up and turns to me as a single flake catches on the rim before melting down the one side into an amber world where bubbles burst and are born, burst and are born.

You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty.

Power knows power.

There is nothing in back of this cafe. Since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility, he back door opens out to a void. It takes courage to turn the knob and heart to leave the steps.

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is -- to live, to work.

She sincerely liked Mattie because unlike the others, Mattie never found the time to do jury duty on other people’s lives.

Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers.

The beginnings are gone, Laurel. But we can start with today and what you got around you.

True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it's a losing battle, they will finalize it rather than have it wrenched from them. Insanity wouldn't permit that type of clarity.

..but it's one of the reflections of our times. Young minds today are dulled by television and other visual sensations. When reading was one of the few pleasures available, we could recite whole passages to eachother.

there are many subtle ways with which you can make one strong point.

Ain't nothing to be shamed of. Having a baby is the most natural thing there is. The Good Book call children a gift from the Lord. And there ain't no place in that Bible of His that say babies is sinful. The sin is the fornicatin', and that's over and done with. God done forgave you of that a long time ago, and what's going on in your belly now ain't nothin' to hang your head about--you remember that.

Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs carried groceries up double flights of steps, and saffron hands strung out wet laundry on backyard lines. Their perspiration mingled with the steam from boiling pots of smoked pork greens, and it curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne that drifted through the street where they stood together - hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when they laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshiped, and shared their men. Their love drove them to fling dishcloths in someone else's kitchen to help him make the rent, or to fling hot lye to help him forget that bitch behind the counter at the five-and-dime. They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place. They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years. Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.

A rumor needs no true parent. It only needs a willing carrier,

Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth.

Then she turned and firmly folded her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams, and let her clothes drop to the floor

I never dreamed that she meant lights. Sparkling. Shimmering. Waves of light. We could see them from the front of the cafe. Besides the few customers, everyone who lived on the street was gathered inside. And I mean everyone, even strange little Esther. She'd squeezed herself into the darkest corner of the room, sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her bent knees. But even her face was in awe. Silvers. Pearls. Iridescent pinks. They now sprayed out into the sunless room and hit the ceiling. The walls. The floor. Glowing copper. Gilded orange. And all kinds or gold. Sequins of light that swirled and spun through the air. Cascades of light flowing in, breaking up, and rolling like fluid diamonds over the worn tile. Emerald. Turquoise. Sapphire. It went on for hours. I looked over there and there were tears streaming down Gabe's wrinkled face: God bless you, Eve. And finally only the muted glow of a cool aquamarine. Then we heard the baby's first thin cry- and the place went wild.

She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie's presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets.

She done mellowed plenty since this marriage. Soft around the edges without getting too soft at the center. You fear that sometimes for women, that they would just fold up and melt away. She'd seen it happen so much in her time, too much for her to head on into it without thinking. Yes, that one time when she was way, way young. But after that, looking at all the beating, the badgering, the shriveling away from a lack of true touching was enough to give her pause. Not that she mighta hooked up with one of those. And not that any man — even if he tried — coulda ever soaked up the best in her. But who needed to wake up each morning cussing the day just to be sure you still had your voice? A woman shouldn't have to fight her man to be what she was; he should be fighting that battle for her.

She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon--and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber.

Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones.

Basil stopped crying instantly in order to enjoy Ciel’s punishment.

God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.

They looked only at the products and thought they saw God—they should have looked at the process.

The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights.

The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bodiless carnival balloons.

Curl moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

New customers are a pain in the butt until they get into the rhythm of things. Fried chicken Mondays. Hamburger Tuesdays. Hash Wednesdays. Pork chop Thursdays. Fish on Fridays. And a weekend open house: breakfast, lunch, dinner: your call.

Cause everybody wants to be right in a world where there ain’t no right or wrong to be found. My side. He don’t listen to my side. Just like that chicken coop, everything’s got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth

And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling. Kiswana was breaking no new trails and would eventually end up just two feet away on that couch. She stared at the woman she had been and was to become.

Ceil moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

In Linden Hills they could forget that the world said you spelled black with a capital nothing. Well, they were something and there was everything around them to show it. The world hadn't given them anything but the chance to fail -- and they hadn't failed, because they were in Linden Hills. They had a thousand years and a day to sit right there and forget what it meant to be black, because it meant working yourself to death just to stand still.

She studied the fine lines and loops, commas and periods that had come between them, and they etched themselves into her mind.

You’re a crafty old woman. You always try to win an argument by talkin’ about some funeral. You’re too ornery to die, and you know it.

If she had seen Ben, nothing would have made her believe that practically every apartment contained a family, a Bible, and a dream that one day enough could be scraped from those meager Friday night paychecks to make Brewster Place a distant memory.

They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place.

That Butch Fuller is a no-’count ditch hound, and no decent woman would be seen talkin’ to him. But Butch had a laugh like the edges of an April sunset—translucent and mystifying. You knew it couldn’t last forever, but you’d stand for hours, hoping for the chance to experience just a glimmer of it once again.

These young men always moved in a pack, or never without two or three. They needed the others continually near to verify their existence.

But she noticed that some of the people who had spoken to her before made a point of having something else to do with their eyes when she passed, although she could almost feel them staring at her back as she moved on.

That's one of the privileges of old age, - you can give plenty of advice 'cause most folks think that's all you got left anyway.

Small places live on small talk, but sometimes the happenings can be too lean for everybody to get enough fat out of it to chew over.

Although I loved horror, I wasn’t writing horror then. And sometime between elementary school and graduate school, my characters had transformed from young Black characters on fantastic and futuristic adventures to white characters having quiet epiphanies. I had wonderful writing teachers in college, but somehow with all of that exposure to “canon,” I had lost track of my own voice and was imitating writers whose stories were nothing like the ones hidden in my heart. I was a young Black woman raised by two civil rights activists—attorney John Due and Patricia Stephens Due—and I had grown up in the newly integrated suburbs of Miami-Dade County. I had never seen my life reflected in fiction; I felt like an imposter when I tried to write Black rural or city characters. I often wish I had discovered the writing of Octavia E. Butler sooner, but I had not. Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely. Then I discovered Mama Day by Gloria Naylor—finally, a book by a highly respected Black woman writer with metaphysical themes! Mama Day helped nudge me past my fear that I could not be a respected writer, especially as a Black writer, if I wrote about the supernatural. During this time, I also interviewed Anne Rice for my newspaper, since she was scheduled to appear at the Miami Book Fair International. I read one of the novels in her Vampire Chronicles series to prepare, and I also found an article about her in a highly respected magazine suggesting that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. My worst fear realized! During that telephone interview, I asked Rice how she responded to criticism like this and then listened carefully for her answer—not for my readers, but for me. Rice actually laughed. “That used to bother me,” she said, “but my books are taught in universities.” Then she explained that by writing about the supernatural, she was liberated to discuss big themes like life, death, and love. Touché. Between Hurricane Andrew, Mama Day, and Anne Rice’s (unwitting) advice, I wrote The Between in nine months, looking past my own fears as a writer to follow my true passions. My protagonist, Hilton James, is a Black man who lives in the suburbs. His family reminded me of my own.

qualities which bind her to the heroines of any number of later works by African American women writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor.

Well, I guess she meant giving up that part of you that let's you know who you are. She would often say, 'Child, there's gonna come a time when you'll look at the world and not know what the blazes is going on. Somebody' ll be calling you their father, their husband, their boss--whatever. And it can get confusing, trying to sort all that out, and you can lose yourself in other people's minds. You can forget what you really want and believe. So you keep that mirror and when it's crazy outside, you look inside and you'll always know exactly where you are and what you are. And you call that peace.

And Ciel lay down and cried. But Mattie knew the tears would end. And she would sleep. And morning would come.

So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.

(Gloria Naylor)' ...Olanaksız bir programa göre çalıştığımı o sırada fark etmemiştim.' diyordu daha sonra. Tatil günlerinde, iş ve okul saatleri arasında, oteldeki gece vardiyasında ne zaman vakit bulursa yazıyordu. 'Tek başıma çalışıyordum, çünkü bir çalışan geceleyin bütün otelin işini görebilir' diyordu 1988'deki bir söyleşisinde. 'Geceleyin iki buçuk üçten sonra oturuyor, o gün yazdıklarımın düzenlemesiyle uğraşıyordum. İşleri bu şekilde yürütmek zorundaydım.' (s.261)

(Gloria Naylor) ...Çalışma programı elindeki tasarıya ve diğer işlerine bağlı olarak değişiyordu, ama fırsat bulduğu zaman tercihi sabah erken kalkmak ve öğlen on iki ya da bire kadar çalışmak, sonra da edebiyatla ilgisi olmayan işlerini halletmekti. Çalışma koşulları konusunda hiç seçici değildi. 'İhtiyaçlarım basit' diyordu. 'Temelde sadece ılık ve sessiz bir yere ihtiyacım vardır çalışmak için' (s.262)

of character, who don’t believe it when you tell ’em it’s really anything they want. They sit there confused and silly, craning their necks all around, asking over and over for a menu.

She looked like an African goddess…a full round face holding an even rounder set of eyes, all of it as dark as that gorgeous unruly hair. She had it in one thick crown of braids that circled her head. When my eyes moved down, the scenery got even better: one of those gazette necks, a compact chest, an invisible waist, and then what can only be described as a Bantu butt. I can’t remember anything about her legs or the turn of her ankles, my journey ended at that butt. Only a fool keeps traveling when the roads brought him to paradise.

They didn’t understand the importance of a family, of life. All of those sacrifices to build them houses and they refused to build a history.

Lie to everyone in this man’s world if need be, but never lie to yourself, because that’s the quickest road to destruction.

All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill.

Everything about Butch was like puffed air and cotton candy, but it thrilled her anyway whenever he straightened up to call to her through the tall grass.

If you don't make it home, I'm marrying the butcher. Love Nadine

An entire week of drawn shades was evidence enough to send her flying around with reports that as soon as it got dark they pulled their shades down and put on the lights. Heads nodded in knowing unison—a definite sign. If doubt was voiced with a “But I pull my shades down at night too,” a whispered “Yeah, but you’re not that way” was argument enough to win them over.

Whatever was lacking within him that made it impossible to confront the difficulties of life could not be supplied with words. She saw it now. There was a void in his being that had been padded and cushioned over the years, and now that covering had grown impregnable. She bit on her bottom lip and swallowed back a sob. God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother’s arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it—a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled—and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

Confronted with the difference that had been thrust into their predictable world, they reached into their imaginations and, using an ancient pattern, weaved themselves a reason for its existence. Out of necessity they stitched all of their secret fears and lingering childhood nightmares into this existence, because even though it was deceptive enough to try and look as they looked, talk as they talked, and do as they did, it had to have some hidden stain to invalidate it—it was impossible for them both to be right.

The alien pounding and the heat and the dark glistening bodies dragged her back, back past the cold ashes of her innocence to a time when pain could be castrated on the sharp edges of iron-studded faith.

But she didn’t want to stay there, so she climbed back out the window, through the glass eyes of the seven-foot Good Shepherd, and started again the futile weaving of invisible ifs and slippery mights into an equally unattainable past.

The pressure on her arm brought Etta back onto the uncomfortable wooden pew. But she didn’t want to stay there, so she climbed back out the window, through the glass eyes of the seven-foot Good Shepherd, and started again the futile weaving of invisible ifs and slippery mights into an equally unattainable past.

In short, his entire life became a race against the natural—and he was winning.

She ain't gotta worry about going on to hell. Hell was right now. Daddy always said that folks misread the Bible. Couldn't be no punishment worse than having to live here on earth, he said.

Where could she be going with all them kids? The welfare office wasn’t open. She was greeted with the friendly caution that women hold toward unmarried women who repeatedly have children—since they aren’t having them by their own husbands, there is always the possibility they are having them by yours.

Reminiscences of old, dried-over pains were no consolation in the face of this. They had the effect of cold beads of water on a hot iron - they danced and fizzled up while the room stank from their steam.