But he had chosen solitude and the company of other solitary people - opted for it when everybody else had long ago surrendered, because he never wanted to live in the world their way. There was something wrong with the rites. He had wanted another way.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenage dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility or a dead end.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

That was the sole lesson of their world: How to make waste, how top make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to sepise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate. And it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally they would know true peace and the happiness they had been looking for all along.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)