The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen Quotes

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t “belong.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

“She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“No, certainly he didn’t. Not actually. He couldn’t, not very well, since he didn’t know. But he would have. It amounts to the same thing. And I’m sure it was just as unpleasant.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“The chagrin which she had felt at her first failure to subvert this latest manifestation of his discontent had receded, leaving in its wake an uneasy depression. Were all her efforts, all her labors, to make up to him that one loss, all her silent striving to prove to him that her way had been best, all her ministrations to him, all her outward sinking of self, to count for nothing in some unperceived sudden moment? And if so, what, then, would be the consequences to the boys? To her? To Brian himself? Endless searching had brought no answer to these questions. There was only an intense weariness from their shuttlelike procession in her brain.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“I have imagined Helga Crane as a dancer or, like Larsen herself, a writer, but one who would find a way to devise a more satisfying ending than the script the world had handed her.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy, of God.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“And the beauty of leaning on the wisdom of God, of trusting, gave her a queer sort of satisfaction. Faith was really quite easy. One had only to yield. To ask no questions. The more weary, the more weak, she became, the easier it was. Her religion was to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Yet she had continued to try not only to teach but to befriend those happy singing children, whose charm and distinctiveness the school was so surely ready to destroy.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

“If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have gone on to the end, never seeing any of you. But that did something to me, and I’ve been so lonely since! You can’t know. Not close to a single soul. Never anyone to really talk to.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“It wasn’t now, as it had been once, that she was afraid that he would throw everything aside and rush off to that remote place of his heart’s desire. He wouldn’t, she knew. He was fond of her, loved her, in his slightly undemonstrative way. And there were the boys. It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that, though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. Nor did she admit that all other plans, all other ways, she regarded as menaces, more or less indirect, to that security of place and substance which she insisted upon for her sons and in a lesser degree for herself.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“After all these years to still blame her like this. Hadn’t his success proved that she’d been right in insisting that he stick to his profession right there in New York? Couldn’t he see, even now, that it had been best? Not for her, oh no, not for her—she had never really considered herself—but for him and the boys. Was she never to be free of it, that fear which crouched, always, deep down within her, stealing away the sense of security, the feeling of permanence, from the life which she had so admirably arranged for them all, and desired so ardently to have remain as it was? That strange, and to her fantastic, notion of Brian’s of going off to Brazil, which, though unmentioned, yet lived within him; how it frightened her, and—yes, angered her!”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“She said: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Brian darling, I’m really not such an idiot that I don’t realize that if a man calls me a nigger it’s his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“And mingled with her disbelief and resentment was another feeling, a question. Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ignorant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin? Why had she allowed him to make his assertions and express his misconceptions undisputed? Why, simply because of Clare Kendry, who had exposed her to such torment, had she failed to take up the defense of the race to which she belonged?”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“What right, she kept demanding of herself, had Clare Kendry to expose her, or even Gertrude Martin, to such humiliation, such downright insult?”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth’s type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time. So many that Brian had said: “Pretty soon the colored people won’t be allowed in at all, or will have to sit in Jim Crowed sections.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“qualities which bind her to the heroines of any number of later works by African American women writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“This one time in her life, she was convinced, she had not clutched a shadow and missed the actuality. She felt compensated for all previous humiliations and disappointments and was glad. If she remembered that she had had something like this feeling before, she put the unwelcome memory from her with the thought:" This time I know I'm right. This time it will last.”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories