30 Best Beloved Quotes

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. – Sethe

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. – Paul D

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. – Sethe

I am Beloved and she is mine.

It was not a story to pass on.

Me? Me?

She moved him. Not the way he had beat off the baby's soul—she had done that—but moved him nonetheless.

You your best thing, Paul D. You are. – Sethe

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding.

To belong to a weapon of your own body.

Make a trail out of the garden...to show them the way.

She forgot the hand-holding shadows of the sycamores, the smell of pine, the cartwheels of lightning, the rope of blood that shot up and rained down on her.

Risky, 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.

This is not a story to pass on.

Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.

She was my sister. She was me.

And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Now she claimed every part of it.

It was a kind of sleepwalking, not being able to see dream or wake.

She is the one; she is the one I need. You are my sister. You are my daughter. You are my face; you are me.

The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard.

She never mentioned the party, or the woman who knocked her down, or how she had choked. Nothing. As though it had never happened.

She is a friend of my mind.

And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.

She didn't know where the world stopped and she began.

She didn't know where the world stopped and she began.

It's gonna hurt, now, anything coming back to life hurts.

All of it is now, it is always now.