Quotes from Nella Larsen

You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of … It's like an ache, a pain that never ceases…

qualities which bind her to the heroines of any number of later works by African American women writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor.

Her long hands were a little uplifted and clasped tightly together.

I think that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.

I'm homesick, not for America, but for Negroes.

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.

What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?

It's funny about 'passing.' We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.

Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it

It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn't matter, if no one knew.

I'm not such an idiot that I don't realize that if a man calls me a nigger it's his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again.

I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.

Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to and hold for definite examination, became almost intolerable. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped.

And yet she hadn't the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.

Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it.

Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.

She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.

Well, what of it? If sex isn't a joke, what is it

To each his own milieu. Enhance what was already in one's possession.

She wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.