The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving,, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In , through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who [198] had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (pp.198-199).
[...]
Clever [i.e., the character Halle], but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined. (p.190.)
[...]
What was more - much more - out there were whitepeople and how could you tell about them? Sethe said the mouth and sometimes the hands. Grandma Baby said there was no defence - they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did.’ (p.243.)
[...]
Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there whould never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning - that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant - what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the bany blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so hear head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored bdy, plump and sweet with life - Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realised that worse than that - far worse - was what Baby Suggs had died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D. tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and the others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. [...] Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing - the part of her that was clean. [251.]