(Love) is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion—because hatred is involved in it, too.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.

The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend

You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.