Nella Larsen Quotes

13 Sourced 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
I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.

Nella Larsen
Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to and hold for definite examination, became almost intolerable. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped.

Nella Larsen
New York's the lonesomest place in the world if you don't know anybody.

Nella Larsen
Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

Nella Larsen
These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.

Nella Larsen
I'm homesick, not for America, but for Negroes.

Nella Larsen
Lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn't, they couldn't endure.

Nella Larsen
That's what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it.

Nella Larsen
Faith was really quite easy. One had only to yield. To ask no questions. The more weary, the more weak she became, the easier it was.

Nella Larsen
And suddenly she was oddly cold. An intimation of things distant, but nonetheless disturbing, oppressed her with a faintly sick feeling. Like a heavy weight, a stone weight, just where she knew, was her stomach.

Nella Larsen
Being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.

Nella Larsen
She [Irene] wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

Nella Larsen