Passing Quotes Flashcards
Irene about Clare’s uncaringness
‘Clare Kendry did not care for the race. She only belonged to it’
Clare as someone who invites trouble
‘Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside.
Clare’s second letter to Irene
‘You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of….It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases.’
Irene describes Clare’s mouth as?
‘A tempting mouth’
Gertrude’s opinion of her children’s races
‘Nobody wants a dark child’
Irene forces her husband to live in the same suppression she lives in
‘that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress’
Brian’s longing for something
‘Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him’
Book’s ‘thesis’ on ‘passing’
‘It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it.’
Brian’s views on sex
it’s ’a grand joke, the greatest in the world’ ‘if sex isn’t a joke, what is it?’
Irene’s comments on her husbands appearance
‘not, of course, pretty or effeminate’
‘merely ordinarily good-looking but for the richness, the beauty of his skin’
Irene’s reaction to Clare kissing her hair
‘dear god! but aren’t you lovely Clare!’
‘Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling’
Irene’s question to why Clare wants to go to the Negro Welfare League dance
‘you mean because so many other white people go?’
irene’s quote about money
‘as we’ve said before, everything must be paid for’
Irene’s use of other colours for skin tone to represent how black and white create a false racial dichotomy that doesn’t represent the breadth of human diversity
‘pink’ and ‘golden’
Clare’s thoughts on being a mother
‘I think that being a mother is the worst thing in the world’
‘margery? she’s all that holds me back’
