Ayana Mathis Quotes

Some things you can't apologize for, you just have to try to get around them," Hattie replied. "For your own sake too, so you can have a little peace.

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret.

There were too many disappointments to name and too much heartbreak. They were beyond punishment or forgiveness, beyond what they had inflicted on each other, beyond love.

I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

Fine doesn't call before dawn.

It seemed to him that he could never get a proper grip on any of the beauty in this world.

My God, but you are hard to love," Hattie

All of them
Hattie and Willie and Evelyn and even ruined, crazy Walter
were little lights; sparks flying upward in dark places, trying to stay alight though they were compelled toward ash. They were nearly extinguished one moment, then orange and luminous the next.

I wonder if the brass understands that people are getting killed.

Maybe we have only a finite amount of love to give. We're born with our portion, and if we love and are not loved enough in return, it's depleted.

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity
like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Bell lifted her hand to her chest. Her heart beat so quickly. She was floating out on a tide of agony, and soon she would be carried so far she'd never come back.

It was important to do what needed doing, no matter the day or the circumstance.

Now, we struggle, brothers and sisters, and we strive. We have our trials and our tribulations but we are blessed. We go to bed, praise Jesus, and we rise again in the morning. And if that's not a blessing, I don't know what is.

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

Six wasn't sure religion was any more than a lot of people caught up in a collective delirium that disappeared the minute they stepped out of the church doors and onto the street.

Hattie had never been easy to love. She was too quiet, it was impossible to know what she was thinking. And she was angry all of the time and so disdainful when her high expectations weren't met.

At last, her mother and sisters exited the station and came to stand next to her. "Mama," Hattie said. "I'll never go back. Never.

I try to look for the beauty in things.

The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She'd left him with all their children. She was holding another man's baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.

Six understood in that instant that he had something the ministers wanted and it had given him power among them. He had never been powerful among men.

In Georgia, there was a eucalyptus tree in the wood across from Hattie's house, but the plant had been hard to come by in the Philadelphia winter.

Hattie clambered from the train, her skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud, the dream of Philadelphia round as a marble in her mouth and the fear of it a needle in her chest.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

She had been with her share of schemers and men who were forever building castles in the sky. All of those dreams made out of clouds; when it rained - and it always did - they were left with nothing but the soggy shirts on their backs.

You act like your whole life was one long January afternoon." Lawrence said. "It wouldn't do any good to go around with my head in the clouds.

Down the hall the children slept three to a bedroom; Hattie could almost hear them growing, their wrists lengthening and poking out beyond the cuffs of their sleeves, their feet outgrowing their shoes, their shoulders widening and pulling the fabric of their coats taut.

It seems to me that everything is on its way to becoming something else, giving itself up in the service of another. In

She didn't know what to make of this sporadic urgency with him. It had confounded and humiliated her for the thirty years of their marriage. These endless pregnancies. And worse, her body's insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

The butterflies were still alive in the Mason jar. August turned to her and said, "We gon' make it through, Hattie." She snatched the jar from the table and hurled it at the wall behind August. The two of them watched the butterflies, stunned and struggling in the broken glass.O

She wished the man outside really were Thomas, so she and Billups could again have the same enemy and the same fear.O

She had her nose so high in the air she could smell the birds farting.

His soul was susceptible to god's whimsy, just as his body was susceptible to any opportunistic thing that might hurt it. If he'd known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.

I have looked at my father many times and wondered how he could stand knowing he was my mother's ruin. He was too weak to leave her. Mother should have thrown him out and saved them both, like Sissy was saving the two of us.

Mother was a beautiful young woman; the house was too plain, too small to contain her. I watched her; for the first time I understood that she had an inner life that didn't have anything to do with me or my brothers and sisters.

You ought to go now before she wakes up, Hattie said. She handed her daughter to Pearl. I'm in the floor, she thought.

No one could tell her why things had turned out as they had, not August or the pastor or God himself.

It had been easy to be comfortable with each other when there was a glass wall between them.

Eudine did not reply. She was indecipherable, so ageless and immaculate. Her eyes were the same caramel shade as her skin. Her face was a placid lake, such depths. A woman with a face like that could be a confessor, could be told anything, no matter how awful, and remain steady as granite.