No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

Much handled things are always soft(27).