Sula
Table of Contents
Introduction
Toni Morrison wrote Sula while commuting to a Manhattan office job, raising her children largely alone, and living in financial precarity in Queens. She was surrounded by other single mothers, women who traded, in her words, “Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory — and daring” (p. 4). Nobody was watching them. Nobody was enforcing anything.
Morrison states,
“Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore… Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.” (p.4)
And in that atmosphere, Morrison began to ask a question she would build a novel around: what would radical freedom have looked like for Black women forty years earlier, when the consequences were far higher and the protections far fewer? “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” (p.4)
The result is an examination of female selfhood, friendship, community, and what happens when a woman decides to belong, above all, to herself. Sula is about freedom and what it costs. About friendship and what it survives. About how communities both protect and devour their own.
Morrison names her central questions directly in the foreword: “What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to Black women outside their own society’s approval? What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static community?” (p. 3)
Sula does not resolve these questions. It holds them open and leaves us to decide.
The Book in 3 Sentences
Sula Peace grows up in the Black hill neighborhood of Medallion, Ohio, alongside her best friend Nel Wright, and returns after a decade away as an outlaw figure (sexually free, answerable to no one) who simultaneously fractures and galvanizes the community around her. Nel, who chose convention, marriage, and belonging, discovers too late that the grief she carried for most of her adult life was not for her husband Jude, who left, but for Sula, who died. Morrison uses their friendship, and its rupture, to probe the costs of conformity, the violence of community judgment, and the tragedy of two women who were, together, more complete than either could be alone.
Key Characters
Sula Peace is the daughter of Hannah Peace and granddaughter of Eva. Sula grows up in a crowded household that is loud, warm, and chaotic. She is physically distinguished by a rose-shaped birthmark over one eye.
Sula leaves Medallion at seventeen, after Nel’s wedding. She spends ten years moving through American cities and finds them all the same. She returns in 1937 and immediately unsettles everything: puts Eva in a nursing home, sleeps with Jude, takes and discards the town’s men without apology or explanation.
She is not evil in any conventional sense. She simply has no interest in performing goodness. When Hannah catches fire in the yard, Sula watches with something close to fascination. She feels what she feels and does not arrange it for anyone else’s comfort.
Morrison calls her an artist with no art form. That is the tragedy: all that intelligence and feeling and curiosity, with nowhere to go except through people and out the other side. Sula dies alone in 1940, at thirty.
Nel Wright is Sula’s mirror and complement. Raised by Helene to be orderly, obedient, and pleasing, she learns early to tuck herself away. Her friendship with Sula is the one place she is ever fully herself.
She marries Jude, raises three children, and becomes a pillar of the Bottom. When Jude leaves her for Sula, she rebuilds around duty, virtue, and carefully managed grief. The novel lets us admire her steadiness for a long time.
Then Eva’s accusation in 1965 breaks it open. The composure Nel has worn her whole life turns out to be, at least partly, coldness; a performance she never examined because examining it would have cost too much.
Standing in the cemetery in 1965, she realizes she has not been mourning Jude all these years. She has been mourning Sula. Her final cry, “girlgirlgirl (p.135)” is the emotional climax of the novel, arriving twenty-five years after Sula’s death.
Eva Peace is Sula’s grandmother, and the matriarch of the Peace house. Eva’s husband abandons her in 1895 with no money and three children. She disappears for eighteen months and returns with one leg, new money, and a strong will to survive.
She builds a large, rambling house on Carpenter’s Road that fills with boarders and strays she renames as she sees fit. She runs it like a small kingdom because it is one.
Her love is controlling and absolute. When Plum comes back from the war a heroin addict, she burns him alive rather than watch him dissolve slowly. When Hannah catches fire in the yard, Eva throws herself from a second-story window to reach her. Neither act saves anyone. Both are completely in character.
When Sula returns to Medallion, she puts Eva in a nursing home and takes control of the estate. It is an act that mirrors Eva’s own logic: a unilateral decision made without apology.
Hannah Peace is Eva’s eldest daughter and Sula’s mother, a widow of “extraordinary beauty and funky elegance” (p.38) who moves through the neighborhood’s men with ease and no possessiveness. She is guileless about it. She teaches Sula, by example, that sex is “pleasant and frequent but otherwise unremarkable” (p. 38).
What damages Sula is not anything dramatic. It is one overheard sentence: Hannah telling a friend she loves Sula but does not like her.
In the summer of 1923, Hannah catches fire in the yard. Eva throws herself from a second-story window to reach her. Hannah dies of her burns anyway
Shadrackis a shell-shocked World War I veteran, institutionalized after the war and returned to Medallion with no support and no resources. What broke him was not death itself but its unpredictability; the way it arrived without warning and could not be outrun.
His response is to institutionalize it himself. He founds National Suicide Day, held every January 3rd, parading through town with a cowbell and a rope and inviting the community to get death “out of the way” (p. 15). The Bottom absorbs this ritual into its calendar. Shadrack becomes a fixed point (mad in a recognizable, manageable way) which is precisely why the community can hold him.
He is also, quietly, one of the novel’s most important figures. Sula visits him after Chicken Little drowns, terrified and seeking something she cannot name. He gives her the one word he has: “always.” She does not understand it. Years later, after Sula’s death, Shadrack keeps her belt on a nail by his bed. She was the only visitor he ever had. The Bottom discarded her; he kept her.
Jude Greene is Nel’s husband. A waiter at the Hotel Medallion, Jude wants construction work and is denied it because of his race. He marries Nel instead; not out of love exactly, but to confirm his manhood, and assuage his rage and humiliation:
He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. (p.67)
Jude eventually sleeps with Sula and leaves Nel, though Sula wants nothing lasting from him either. Jude is not a villain, but he is a careless man.
Helene Wright is Nel’s mother. Helene is the daughter of a Creole prostitute, raised by her grandmother to suppress every trace of her mother’s origins. She marries Wiley Wright, moves to Medallion, and builds her authority out of impeccable behavior.
When her grandmother dies, she travels south with Nel. In New Orleans they briefly meet Rochelle, Helene’s biological mother. It is the only time Nel leaves Medallion.
Returning home, Nel thinks: “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me.” (p.26) This awakening of selfhood leads her, despite her mother’s disapproval, to befriend Sula, the one choice in her life that is fully her own.
Ajax (Albert Jacks) is a foul-mouthed pool-hall regular who is, underneath, surprisingly gentle and genuinely interesting. He visits Sula out of curiosity; she reminds him of his mother, a conjure woman he adores. He is the only man in the novel who talks to her as an equal.
Their relationship is the one time Sula feels genuine possession, and it destroys itself the moment she shows it. When she ties a ribbon in her hair and sets the table for two, Ajax recognizes the signs of attachment, and leaves for an air show in Dayton. Sula discovers, after he is gone, that she never knew his real name.
Key Locations
The Bottom
The Bottom is the neighborhood where the novel is set. Perched in the hills above the valley town of Medallion, Ohio, the Bottom was given its name through a cruel racist joke: a white farmer convinced an enslaved man that the hilly land above the valley was “the bottom of heaven — best land there is.” (p.8) and therefore the choicest soil.
The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter (p.8)
The community that grew there carried that founding inversion within it. They had been tricked into calling hardship paradise, and the name stuck.
Morrison opens and closes the novel at the Bottom. By 1965, it no longer exists as a Black neighborhood. White developers have bought the hills, and the community has been demolished to make room for a golf course. What sustained the community, “music, dancing, craft, religion, irony, wit” (p. 6), has been erased.
Eva’s House, 7 Carpenter’s Road
Eva’s enormous, self-designed house with three staircases, constantly changing rooms, and a permanent flow of boarders and strays. For Sula, it is the house of freedom and noise. For Nel, visiting as a child, it was a relief from her own mother’s suffocating neatness.
The house carries the weight of the Peace women’s history: Plum was burned alive in his room; Hannah burned to death in the yard; Sula dies alone in Eva’s bed. By 1940 it is a hollow, boarded-up shell.
The River
The river is where Chicken Little drowns, the novel’s central site of guilt, shared silence, and complicity. It is where Sula and Nel’s friendship is sealed in the darkest possible way. The closed, quiet place in the water after the body goes under becomes an image Morrison returns to throughout: the space of things unsaid, unexamined, and only partially understood.
Major Themes
1. The Outlaw Woman and the Cost of Female Freedom
Morrison was drawn to the question of what radical female freedom would have looked like for Black women in the 1920s and 30s. Sula is her attempt to find out. She is free of ambition, ego, vanity, and the need for approval. She treats her body and her time as her own. She defines herself by what she thinks and feels rather than by her relationships to others.
The cost is total isolation. She cannot maintain friendship once she abandons convention, because friendship in Medallion requires a shared language of obligation that Sula does not possess. Morrison puts it plainly:
“Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance… she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” (p.95)
2. Female Friendship and the Limits of It
Sula and Nel are, Morrison argues, a single entity divided into two. Together they “were neither white nor male, and… had set about creating something else to be” (p. 44). Each supplies what the other lacks: Nel provides consistency and groundedness; Sula provides motion, daring, and the refusal of self-deception.
It was like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed. Her old friend had come home. Sula. Who made her laugh, who made her see old things with new eyes, in whose presence she felt clever, gentle and a little raunchy. Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself. Was there anyone else before whom she could never be foolish? In whose view inadequacy was mere idiosyncrasy, a character trait rather than a deficiency? Anyone who left behind that aura of fun and complicity? Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves. (p. 74)
But the friendship cannot survive convention. Nel’s marriage installs a possessiveness that Sula, raised in a house where all men were available to all women, cannot understand. Morrison refuses to adjudicate: Sula’s betrayal is real, and so is her genuine incomprehension of it..
She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing. She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude. They had always shared the affection of other people: compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available, and selected from among them with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close to. She knew well enough what other women said and felt, or said they felt. But she and Nel had always seen through them. They both knew that those women were not jealous of other women; that they were only afraid of losing their jobs. Afraid their husbands would discover that no uniqueness lay between their legs. (p. 93)
Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. Now she wanted everything, and all because of that. Nel was the first person who had been real to her, whose name she knew, who had seen as she had the slant of life that made it possible to stretch it to its limits. Now Nel was one of them. …Now Nel belonged to the town and all of its ways. She had given herself over to them….(p. 94)
3. Good, Evil, and The Performance of Goodness
One of the novel’s darkest arguments concerns what ‘being good’ actually means in practice. Nel has organized her adult life around the evidence of her own virtue: she was composed at Chicken Little’s funeral, self-controlled after Jude left, dutiful in her visits to the sick.
But Eva’s accusation: “You watched, didn’t you?” (p.131): forces her to acknowledge that her calm at the river was not composure but pleasure; and that the goodness she has performed since then sits on top of something she has never looked at directly:
But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped. She hadn’t wondered about that in years. “Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?” (p.132)
Morrison’s question is not subtle but it is serious: if the feeling underneath is identical, does the performance make someone good? Sula feels everything and performs nothing, and the community buries her as evil. Nel performs goodness while suppressing what she actually is, and the community considers her respectable. The novel leaves the hierarchy intact while refusing to endorse it.
How you know?” Sula asked. “Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her. “About who was good. How you know it was you?” “What you mean?” “I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.” p.114
And Morrison keeps complicating it from every angle. Eva burns her son. Nel feels a flicker of pleasure watching a child drown. The community’s virtue is revealed to be largely reactive: it was organized around Sula’s presence, and when she dies, it deteriorates. They were good mostly in contrast to her.
The question Morrison is really asking is not whether Sula is evil. It is whether evil is the thing that transgresses, or the thing that transgresses and will not admit it.
4. Individualism vs. Community
The novel examines the risks of individualism within a “racially uniform and socially static community” (p. 3). Into that community Morrison drops Sula, who lives an “experimental life”:
Sula was distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full rein, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her… She had no center, no speck around which to grow… She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments—no ego. For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself—be consistent with herself. (p. 92)
Morrison traces this freedom to two formative ruptures: her mother’s careless remark, which taught Sula there was no one she could count on, and the drowning of Chicken Little, which taught her there was no self to count on either.
The community is not, by nature, intolerant. It survives by absorbing deviance. Shadrack’s madness is folded into the ritual calendar. Tar Baby’s drinking is quietly endured. Hannah’s sexuality generates gossip but not exile. The Bottom’s tolerance is elastic but conditional: the deviant must remain classifiable. Shadrack is mad in a recognizable way. Hannah is promiscuous in a recognizable way.
Sula breaks that logic entirely. She puts Eva in a home, sleeps with white men (or is rumored to), and refuses to organize her sexuality around anyone else’s meaning. She cannot be classified, thus she is labeled a “pariah” (p. 96), a “roach” (p. 88), a “witch” (p. 116).
While Sula is alive, the Bottom’s women are more devoted, more attentive, more virtuous. Sula’s presence served a socially stabilizing function; something for the community to push against. When she dies, that structure collapses. The moral life of the Bottom was never self-sustaining. It was reactive, organized around a threat. The community did not merely tolerate the scapegoat. It needed one.
5. The Complexities of Motherhood
Eva, Hannah, and Sula represent three generations of motherhood and three different relationships to it; each woman’s position is a response to the one before her.
Eva’s love is possessive and absolute. Eva reportedly sacrificed her leg to provide for her children. That love reaches its limit with Plum: she burns her son rather than watch him regress into drug addiction. The act is extreme, but Eva’s reasoning is internally consistent. She would rather end him than lose him.
Hannah loves without that intensity; easily, without possession or demand. What damages Sula is a single overheard sentence: Hannah telling a friend she loves her daughter Sula but doesn’t like her.
Sula refuses motherhood altogether: “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself” (p.73). Motherhood in the Bottom is how a woman is recognized and classified. Sula refuses the classification, and the community responds the only way it knows how: it calls her a witch.
Key Motifs and Symbols
Fire
Fire runs through the Peace family with terrible consistency. Eva burns Plum alive as an act of maternal love. Hannah catches fire in the yard and dies. Eva throws herself onto Hannah’s burning body. Sula threatens Eva with kerosene.
Morrison does not explain the pattern, but it suggests that in this family, love and destruction are not opposites. They are the same impulse, repeatedly, at increasing cost.
Water
Where fire is the Peace family’s element, water is the novel’s element of silence and finality. The river takes Chicken Little, closing over him without ceremony. Sula, dying, imagines sinking into water as a form of rest. Water in this novel does not punish. It accepts, swallows, and keeps. It is what happens after the unspeakable thing, the quiet that follows.
Sula’s Birthmark
Everyone reads Sula’s birthmark differently. Some see a stemmed rose. Others see a snake. Others see Hannah’s ashes, as if Sula was marked by her mother’s death before it happened.
Morrison eventually names it a stemmed rose, but the point is not the correct answer. Every reading of the birthmark is a reading of the person doing the reading. The mark tells us nothing reliable about Sula. It tells us exactly what each observer needed her to be.
The Gray Ball
After Jude leaves, Nel becomes aware of something hovering just to the right of her:
There was something just to the right of her, in the air, just out of view. She could not see it, but she knew exactly what it looked like. A gray ball hovering just there. Just there. To the right. Quiet, gray, dirty. A ball of muddy strings, but without weight, fluffy but terrible in its malevolence. (p. 84)
She spends a summer carefully not looking at it. The ball is everything she has refused to examine: her grief, her guilt, the parts of herself she buried rather than faced. She knows it is there. She looks away anyway.
The Bottom
The Bottom itself is the novel’s organizing symbol of inversions and illusions. The bottom is at the top. The villain holds the community together. Virtue conceals cruelty. The grieving woman has been mourning the wrong loss.
Morrison builds her entire world on an inversion, a racist trick that named hardship paradise, and then shows how thoroughly a community can internalize the terms of its own deception.
Key Scene: The Death of Chicken Little
While playing by the river, Sula swings a young boy named Chicken Little in circles by his hands. He slips, sails out over the water, and drowns. Sula and Nel are the only witnesses.
Days later, a white bargeman finds the body. His reaction tells us everything about how this community exists within a larger world indifferent to its grief:
“He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children… When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way niggers did….He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth” (p.52-53)
At the funeral, Nel and Sula stand apart in the pew. Nel feels guilt, fearing discovery. Sula simply cries. Afterward, they walk home hand in hand. The shared secret cements their bond.
Morrison notes, crucially, that Sula cried and Nel did not, and that Nel’s calm, which she took her whole life for maturity, was in fact something else entirely.
The scene is also the hinge on which the novel’s central friendship turns. The shared secret seals them together. It also plants the thing that will eventually break them apart: not the drowning itself, but what each of them felt, and what they chose to do with that feeling.
How Morrison Tells the Story
1. Structure by Year
The novel is organized in chapters named by year ( 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1927, 1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1965) plus a prologue set in the present tense of a neighborhood already gone.
This structure creates a chronicle of a community across almost fifty years while keeping the individual decades distinct. It gives the novel the feeling of a historical record and a community document, not just a personal story. Each chapter tends to center on a single event or cluster of events, then zoom out to show the community’s processing of them.
2. Two Protagonists, One Story
Morrison does not choose between Nel and Sula as protagonist. Their friendship is the subject, not either life independently.
Morrison structures the first third of the novel as a dual portrait, the middle as a separation, and the final sections as the delayed reckoning of what the separation cost.
The true climax is Nel’s cry in 1965, twenty-five years after Sula’s death.
3. Community as Chorus
Morrison uses the Bottom’s collective consciousness as a kind of Greek chorus that misreads nearly everything it witnesses. The community’s interpretations of Sula (her birthmark, her sexuality, her choices) are largely invented. But they are not random. They reveal the community’s own anxieties about loyalty, sexuality, and death more than they reveal anything about Sula.
Morrison also shows the community at its most genuinely human in Chicken Little’s funeral scene, where the mourning women’s grief flows between Jesus and their private wounds.
As Reverend Deal moved into his sermon, the hands of the women unfolded like pairs of raven’s wings and flew high above their hats in the air. They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word, or phrase, or inflection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term “Sweet Jesus.” And they saw the Lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt. Or they thought of their son newly killed and remembered his legs in short pants and wondered where the bullet went in. Or they remembered how dirty the room looked when their father left home and wondered if that is the way the slim, young Jew felt, he who for them was both son and lover and in whose downy face they could see the sugar-and-butter sandwiches and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it. (p. 54)
The Bottom is neither villainous nor wise. It is a community doing what communities do: projecting, misreading, grieving, surviving.
4. Moral Ambiguity as Method
Morrison extends genuine interiority to every act that could be condemned: Eva burning Plum is presented in Eva’s own language of love and necessity; Sula sleeping with Jude is presented as thoughtless rather than vicious. Even Nel’s long performance of virtue is treated not as hypocrisy but as the only shape her life gave her to work with.
Morrison also withholds strategically. We never know what Eva did to lose her leg, or what happened in the eighteen months she was gone. We never know whether Sula meant to drop Chicken Little. Morrison trusts her readers to sit with ambiguity. She does not explain her characters. She reveals them.
Conclusion
Sula ends not with Sula’s death but with the sound of Nel’s grief twenty-five years later, and that displacement is the novel’s final argument. The conventional woman survives. The outlaw woman dies.
But Morrison refuses to let that outcome function as a verdict: Nel’s survival is not a triumph, but the slow, belated discovery of what she had to suppress in order to survive. She had been mourning the wrong loss for three decades.
“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” p.135
The loss she could name (Jude, marriage, stability) was the socially legible version of a grief she could never afford to acknowledge: the loss of Sula, and with her the only version of herself that had ever been fully free.
Morrison wrote Sula in the late 1960s and early 70s, amid a women’s movement largely indifferent to the specific conditions of Black women’s lives. She was asking what freedom had ever meant, or could mean, for someone who was both Black and female in a country that had historically defined both categories as property.
Sula’s answer is incomplete and costly. It ends in isolation and early death But it is, Morrison insists, a kind of answer.
“In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.” p.6
What the novel preserves is not Sula’s philosophy but her presence; the way the Bottom organized its moral life around her, the way Nel organized her emotional life around her absence, the way Shadrack kept her belt on a nail by his bed for decades because she was the only visitor he ever had. She was real to him in a way she was real to almost no one. That is the measure of what the Bottom lost when it lost Sula; not a good woman, but a real one.
Morrison’s real subject is not whether Sula was good or Nel was right. It is the cost of a world that cannot hold both women at once. Sula needed Nel’s steadiness to have a self to return to. Nel needed Sula’s wildness to have a self worth keeping. Together they were, as Morrison writes, “two throats and one eye” (p.114), a single, complete thing.
The novel’s final cry is not about a husband. It is about the only person who ever made Nel real to herself, and about how long it took her to know it, and how, even then, there was nobody left to tell.
Top Quotes
On Female Freedom
- “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” p.73
- “Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
- “Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
On Friendship
- “Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself.”p.74
- “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.” p.44
- “They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream.” p.43
- “Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.” p.44
- “So she will walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat… thinking how much I have cost her and never remember the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price.” p.114
On Loneliness
- “Lonely, ain’t it?” “Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.” p.111
- In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous. p. 95
On Goodness and Evil
- “It matters, Nel, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.” p.112
- “There was no creature so ungodly as to make them destroy it. They could kill easily if provoked to anger, but not by design, which explained why they could not “mob kill” anyone. To do so was not only unnatural, it was undignified. The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.” p.92
- “Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not.” p.92
- How you know?” Sula asked. “Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her. “About who was good. How you know it was you?” “What you mean?” “I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.” p.114
- “I didn’t mean anything. I never meant anything. I stood there watching her burn and was thrilled. I wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing.” p.115
On Death
- “It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.” p.15
- “She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” p.116
On Maternal Love
- “I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again. He was growed, a big old thing… I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more.” p.58
On Loss
- “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” p.135
Recommended Reading
- The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
- Beloved, by Toni Morrison
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison