How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
When laborers imported from Haiti came to clear the land, clouds and fish were convinced that the world was over, that the sea-green green of the sea and the sky-blue sky of the sky were no longer permanent. (1.1)
There's a lot going on in this passage. The mention of the laborers from Haiti shows you how much the rich Valerian Street has depended on black people to clear land for him. Morrison also makes a point of showing us how much Valerian's plans tend to act against nature, forcing nature to do whatever he wants it to. The colonizing ambitions of white people still exist in the modern day. You're just most likely to see these ambitions in the way white people treat the natural world.
Quote #2
The men had already folded the earth where there had been no fold and hollowed her where there had been no hollow, which explains what happened to the river. (1.1)
Valerian doesn't really care about how he manipulates or ruins the natural world, as long as he can make it comfortable for him and his massive vacation home. The book is making a commentary here not just on Valerian, but the kind of person who would want to force nature to do his bidding. Valerian might look like a nice guy on the surface. But deep down, he has some dark, imperialist tendencies.
Quote #3
The clouds looked at each other, then broke apart in confusion. (1.2)
Even the clouds seem to dislike what Valerian is doing to the natural world of Isle des Chevaliers. Rather than being angry, though, the clouds are just confused. Why would a guy go to so much trouble just to force the world to do what he wants? The answer: because Valerian needs to constantly reassure himself that he can control his surroundings.
Quote #4
Valerian turned his attention to refining the house, its grounds, mail service to the island, measuring French colonial taxes against American residential ones, killing off rats, snakes and other destructive animal life, adjusting the terrain for comfortable living. (2.25)
Valerian's tendency to force nature flares up when his own life isn't going too well. At no time does making nature do his bidding become a bigger preoccupation than when he feels estranged from his son Michael. Michael, you see, was supposed to be Valerian's heir and legacy. But when Michael deserts his mother and father, Valerian realizes that when he dies, there'll be no one left to carry on his life. That's why he pours all of his sad, disappointed energy into controlling as much of life as possible while he slips into old age.
Quote #5
When he knew for certain that Michael would always be a stranger to him, he built the greenhouse as a place of controlled ever-flowering life to greet death in. (2.25)
Valerian is obsessed with his greenhouse and spends nearly every waking moment hanging out inside it. And the reason he built this greenhouse is because he isn't able to control his son Michael. Valerian is really freaked out about his own mortality, and he feels that the only way to feel better is to control his surroundings. That's why he becomes so obsessed with forcing plants to grow in exactly the way he wants them to.
Quote #6
Fog came to that place in wisps sometimes, like the hair of maiden aunts. Hair so thin and pale it went unnoticed until masses of it gathered around the house and threw back one's own reflection from the windows. (3.1)
Morrison has a tendency to use a lot of personification when she talks about nature in this book. She likely does this in order to show us that no matter how hard we try to control the world around us, we are always doomed to fail. Valerian, for example, can cut down all the trees he wants; but he has no power over the thick fog that circles his island.
Quote #7
No, she thought, it must be this place. The island exaggerated everything. Too much light. Too much shadow. Too much rain. Too much foliage and much too much sleep. She'd never slept so deeply in her life. (3.61)
Jade thinks that Isle des Chevaliers tends to exaggerate things because of the way it naturally creates so much rain, shadow, and light. Jeez. It sounds beautiful to us. But the truth is that the isolation of this island also gives Jade a lot of time to reflect on her life and to think about who she wants to be.
Quote #8
Before that mistakable trail, he left the unmistakable one of his smell. Like a beast who loses his animal smell after too long a diet of cooked food, a man's smell is altered by a fast. (4.188)
Of all the characters in this book, Son is the most closely connected with nature. Morrison makes this connection most strongly by comparing the natural smell of Son to that of a beast. Son's partial starvation is likewise compared to the unnatural state of an animal eating cooked people's food.
Quote #9
The young trees sighed and swayed. The women looked down from the rafters of the trees and stopped murmuring. They were delighted when first they saw her, thinking a runaway child had been restored to them. (5.461)
When Jade starts to sink in a tar pond, the trees around her seem to smile with delight at the thought that Jade might be "restored to them." This is an allusion to decomposing and going back to nature after we die. Jade is particularly "runaway," because she has distanced herself so fully from the natural world by preferring urban environments like Paris and New York.
Quote #10
She walked toward it and sank up to her knees. She dropped the pad and charcoal and grabbed the waist of a tree which shivered in her arms and swayed as though it wished to dance with her. (5.460)
Pretty much everything on Isle des Chevaliers has a creepy way of coming alive in this book. In this passage, Jade grabs a tree and finds that it's like a person who wants to dance with her. Nature has a pretty awesome way of speaking back to the characters in this book, which helps remind us that trees are, like humans, living beings.