Passing Quotes

“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 folk as well.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“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, Passing

“It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I'm 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, Passing

“I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“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.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

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

“Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“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.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for colored.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Her reason partly agreed, her instinct wholly rebelled.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I'm human like everybody else. It's just that I'm so tired, so worn out, I can't feel anymore.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much driving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?
Irene didn't know, couldn't decide, though for a long time she sat questioning and trying to understand. Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feelings of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,” Irene demanded, “how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don't seem to suspect it”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Money's awfully nice to have. In
fact, all things considered, I think, 'Rene, that
it's even worth the price.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“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.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“She laughed and the ringing bells in her laugh had a hard metallic sound.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Chicago. August. A brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like molten rain. A day on which the very outlines of the buildings shuddered as if in protest at the heat. Quivering lines sprang up from baked pavements and wriggled along the shining car-tracks. The automobiles parked at the kerbs were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shop-windows threw out a blinding radiance. Sharp particles of dust rose from the burning sidewalks, stinging the seared or dripping skins of wilting pedestrians. What small breeze there was seemed like the breath of a flame fanned by slow bellows.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“It’s only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of nature.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its color, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing