Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
Interpretation
Hatred, like friendship, requires effort and creativity to maintain.
This quote by Toni Morrison emphasizes that both positive and negative emotions, such as friendship and hatred, are not merely based on surface connections or physical interactions. Instead, they demand a deeper level of engagement, creativity, and perseverance to develop and sustain, indicating that emotions are complex and require our active participation to flourish or deteriorate.
In practice
During a discussion about toxic relationships, one might use this quote to explain how hatred can become persistent.
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
We have a tendency to assume or believe saying I love you means we are ready for love, or that hearing it from someone else means they are ready. We just assume that we are on the same page about what it means. We don't know what someone else is thinking, projecting, assuming, expecting when they say that.
You're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?
Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.
I was born Roman, and I'll die Roman. I'll never leave this team or my city.
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