Beloved: Top Ten Quotes

"And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe's bladder filled to capacity." (p. 54)

Sethe sees Beloved sitting on the stump

"She is the one. She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have." (p. 80)

Beloved speaks to Denver about Sethe

"Just like the day she arrived at 124-sure enough, she had milk enough for all." (p. 106)

Sethe believes she has enough love to satisfy everyone.

"The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn't worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway." (p. 146)

Baby Suggs believed Halle would be taken away from her like her other children.

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all." (p.173)

Said by Sethe to Paul D when he tells her that her love is too thick.

"Nobody saw them falling." (p. 182)

The women of 124 are all alone in the woods skating, like they are all alone in life.

"It was then, when Beloved finished humming, that Sethe recalled the click-the settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them." (p. 184)

Sethe realizes who Beloved is.

"Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined." (p. 199)

Sixo claims he was not stealing but simply improving schoolteacher's property.

"But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them." (p. 208)

White people created the uncivilized behavior they saw in the black people.

"I am Beloved and she is mine." (p. 221)

Beloved claims Sethe for hers in a rewriting of the Song of Solomon.