How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped those expressions of affection that had been so loveable in her childhood. (1.1.23)
Ruth’s love of her father is a little bizarre. We would not believe Macon’s suspicions of her incestuous relationship with her father were we not allowed into Dr. Foster’s thoughts. Here Dr. Foster seems aware of an unnaturalness in the nature of Ruth’s affection, an unnaturalness that seems to have been in place before she married Macon. Why would Toni Morrison include Dr. Foster’s trepidations about his daughter’s love? Her love, like the many other loves we see in Song is almost obsessive.
Quote #2
When the two had managed to get the basket into the room, the girl stretched her back and turned around, facing them. But Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind. (1.2.43)
A love doomed from the start, it seems only right that Milkman falls in love with Hagar’s behind. It’s hard to say whether he cares anything about her face or about any other part of her. But what follows is a berry harvesting scene during which Milkman finds he’s happier than he’s ever been before. It seems like Milkman not only falls in love with Hagar’s behind, but with the world of Pilate’s house as well.
Quote #3
The lengths to which lost love drove men and women never surprised them. They had seen women pull their dresses over their heads and howl like dogs for lost love. And men who sat in doorways with pennies in their mouths for lost love. "Thank God," they whispered to themselves, "thank God I ain’t never had one of them graveyard loves." (1.5.128)
The Southside/Not Doctor Street community has seen again and again the effects of obsessive love. It’s at this moment that we realize that this kind of nervous love is not solely characteristic of the four generations of Dead women, but it is characteristic of many women. Love is maybe a means of survival, of forging an identity in the world. This whole identity thing seems easier said than done.
Quote #4
Her passions were narrow but deep. Long deprived of sex, long dependent on self-manipulation, she saw her son’s imminent death as the annihilation of the last occasion she had been made love to. (1.5.134)
Is anyone else just a little weirded out that the crux of Ruth’s concern for Milkman’s life is the fact that he represents to her the last time she got busy? This woman is deprived. And even though the word "love" appears in this passage, we just can’t detect love in anything that it refers to: was love really present when she and Macon conceived Milkman? And is real, true love the impetus for trying to prevent her son’s death? "Love" is used over and over, but do we ever catch a glimpse of real true love?
Quote #5
"There’s no love in it."
"No love? No love? Didn’t you hear me? What I’m doing ain’t about hating white people. It’s about loving us. About loving you. My whole life is love." (1.6.159)
Guitar can’t have friends. He can’t get married. He can’t drink. He can’t go out. He can’t talk to strangers. He has to live a cloistered life. He kills in the name of love, but doesn’t tell anyone about the lengths he is going to in the name of this love. Is this real, true, unselfish love?
Quote #6
"And black women, they want your whole self. Love, they call it, and understanding. ‘Why don’t you understand me?’ What they mean is, Don’t love anything on earth except me. They say, ‘Be responsible,’ but what they mean is, Don’t go anywhere where I ain’t. You try to climb Mount Everest, they’ll tie up your ropes. Tell them you want to go to the bottom of the sea—just for a look—they’ll hide your oxygen tank. […] You blow your lungs out on the horn and they want what breath you got left to hear about how you love them. They want your full attention. Take a risk and they say you not for real. That you don’t love them." (2.10.223)
Guitar slices open the overcrazy, graveyard love that we see so many women afflicted with in Song. Again the theme of possession, control, and ownership comes up. But do we ever see a woman in the universe of this novel pull these kind of ultimatums and power plays on her man? Do we ever see a woman try to control a man in this way?
Quote #7
"Some women love too hard. She watched over him like a pheasant hen. Nervous. Nervous love." (2.10.243)
So, despite the fact that this is a world in which men like to fly off and leave their women folk, Jake (Milkman’s grandfather) keeps returning and appearing before Pilate. And not only that, he keeps calling out for his wife, as though she were the one who left him. It’s surprising then when we hear Circe tell us that Sing was afflicted with the same kind of nervous love that runs rampant throughout the novel. Jake is the one bemoaning the loss of his wife.
Quote #8
Exactly the way he’d heard it would be, his life flashed before him, but it consisted of only one image: Hagar bending over him in perfect love, in the most intimate sexual gesture imaginable. (2.11.279)
We’ve looked through the Kama Sutra several times to see if we can find the sexual position that best fits this description. Despite the fact that we truly, truly want to believe that this is real true love that Milkman is finally feeling and recognizing, we can’t help but notice that Hagar’s going crazy at home for him and that there is still something subservient and imbalanced about this image of "perfect love." Is this the most perfect vision of love we have in Song?
Quote #9
"Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him." (2.13.306)
Guitar could be Cupid. Seriously, the man can philosophize. He has a weepy, loony Hagar on his hands, and he tells her the most practical, sage thing he possibly could. He tells her that love is not about consuming, suffocating, owning the other person. The man is a voice of reason. And yet he’s also a murderer. Killing out of love. So much ambiguity in this novel!! We can’t pin anyone down.
Quote #10
"I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would a loved ‘em all. If I’d knowed more, I would a loved more." (2.15.336)
Why couldn’t Pilate love more people? Where did her love come from? She ends her life thinking about love, and we never see her going crazy over any kind of love. If Guitar kills her out of love, then we have some pretty conflicting kinds of love on our hands.