Nella Larsen is author of Passing (1929). Passing is the story about Irene and Clare, both are friends. It is about two middle-class black women They ware childhood friendship and reunite after a long break since their childhood. Following are some insightful quotes from Passing
I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.
— Nella Larsen
What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?
— Nella Larsen
Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it — Nella Larsen
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 hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.
― 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
I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.
― 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
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
Everything can’t be explained by some general biological phrase.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it
― 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
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
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
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 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
It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
Money’s awfully nice to have. Infact, 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
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
It’s only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of nature.
― 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
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
Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd!
― 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
As if aware of her desire and her hesitation, Clare remarked thoughtfully: “You know, ‘Rene, I’ve often wondered why more colored girls, girls like you and Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and—oh, lots of others—never ‘passed’ over.
― 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
Well, you see, it’s like this. When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
She laughed and the ringing bells in her laugh had a hard metallic sound.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
She regarded with an astonishment that had in it a mild degree of amusement the violence of the feelings which it stirred in her.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
Her long hands were a little uplifted and clasped tightly together.
― Nella Larsen, Passing
