How come it canโt fly no better than a chicken?โ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Canโt nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.โ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.
Toni MorrisonRisky, 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, 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.
Toni MorrisonTwo parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.
Toni Morrison