Nella Larsen Quotes

“Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside.”

“You’ll just have to endure some things and give up other...everything must be paid for.”

“She was caught between two allegiances...Herself. Her race.”

“Irene wasn’t sorry. She was amazed, incredulous almost.”

“A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog.”

“You feel in the presence of something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you.”

“Everything can’t be explained by some general biological phrase.”

“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 folks as well.”

“It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases.”

“We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

“Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle.”

“I had only to break it, and I was rid of it forever.”

“Don’t expect me to give up everything.”

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Money’s awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ‘Rene, that it’s even worth the price.”

“She laughed and the ringing bells in her laugh had a hard metallic sound.”