Цитаты из аудиокниги «Возлюбленная», страница 15

His father, probably, a deeply religious man who knew what God knew and told everybody what it was.

It was as though Sethe didn't really want forgiveness given; she wanted it refused.

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

I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.

Whitepeople 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, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place.

It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread.

In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them.

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.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

"You know as well as I do that people who die bad don't stay in the ground."

He couldn't deny it. Jesus Christ Himself didn't.

When he got to the steps, the voices drained suddenly to less than a whisper. They had become an occasional mutter - like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks.

"Maybe your people know of somebody looking for help."

"I be sure to ask, but I know they take women at the slaughterhouse."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know."

"Something men don't want to do, I reckon."

"You can't protect her every minute. What's going to happen when you die?"

"Nothing! I'll protect her while I'm live and I'll protect her when I ain't."