Beloved by Toni Morrison PDF

Do you love reading Toni Morrison’s books? Would you like to read Beloved by Toni Morrison PDF? Would you like to start an amazing piece of historical fiction? Beloved by Toni Morrison is just the right book for you to add to your reading list. Beloved PDF is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War (1861–65), it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.

Morrison had come across the story “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974. In the book Beloved PDF, Toni Morrison projects the dehumanizing effects of slavery. She examines the mental and physical trauma caused by slavery and its lingering effect on its survivors. Get beloved by Toni Morrison online and read this amazing book.

Table of Contents

Beloved by Toni Morrison PDF Free Download Details

Book Title: Beloved PDF
Author: Toni Morrison
Goodreads Link: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Published: September 16th 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Formats: [PDF] [Epub]
No. of pages: 324
PDF Size: 1 MB
ePub Size: 1 MB
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fictions, Classics, Novels
Language: English
File Status: Available
Price: $0

Summary of Beloved by Toni Morrison PDF

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile, Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Beloved by Toni Morrison Book Review

Below is Beloved by Toni Morrison review [From Goodreads]:

“Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past.”– Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Beloved” focuses on the psychological trauma of slavery which permeates the very atmosphere and even emerges in ghost form. It seems to be a good book to read in the light of the recent discussion on the Roots reboot, as well as the recent New York Times article that discusses how African-American DNA bears signs of slavery. I feel that for many this isn’t too much of a surprise.

It was a tough read, even tougher the second time around. I never get used to books like this; if anything they get more painful as I become more and more aware of what slavery consisted of. One of the things that always gets to me when reading slave narratives is the burdens the slaves had to endure and with little to no help, but I’m learning about the little things they did to try to endure and survive.

Some of their methods may not sound healthy, from our perspectives (for example, limiting love because you know that any time your family could be taken away from you), but this book shows us in many ways how unless we are in a certain situation, it’s really impossible for us to know how we’ll react to it.

At the beginning of the book, former slave Baby Suggs is contemplating colour, all because she is about to die and she has never had the time to do so before. The world of a slave is small and it doesn’t belong to them. And even with freedom, the past still haunts them:

“Her past had been like her present–intolerable–and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering colour.”

Love is one of the themes in this book, and throughout I wondered whether love is ever enough to get over the past. Paul D and Sethe’s love story is against the odds, with Paul D guarding his heart and Sethe still recovering from deaths, abuse, and children running away. Two very broken people, and Paul D with this sort of mentality:

“He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.”

And Sethe:

“Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?”

This time around I tried to focus more on the characters I didn’t dwell on much in my first read, so Denver, Sethe’s daughter, received more of my attention. I pictured her loneliness, loneliness that caused her to value the company of a ghost, which is why she clung to Beloved, who demands so much attention and affection. I ended up liking her character transformation the most:

“In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out.”

Pain is a given throughout the book, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the following quote: “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.” Such a hard truth and the characters in this book had so much more to heal from than the rest of us.

Author Toni Morrison uses magical realism to show how trauma and guilt haunt Sethe’s mind, especially as it concerns her daughter Beloved. Morrison was inspired by a 1856 newspaper article about Margaret Garner, an escaped slave mother who killed her child rather than sentence her child to a life of slavery. As I read “Beloved”, I had no doubts that every horror of slavery and its psychological aftermath in the book described some slave’s reality. It’s a great book that you should consider reading.

Beloved by Toni Morrison quotes

Here are some quotes from Beloved book by Toni Morrison:

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“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean a thing to a mother. The child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart, it doesn’t mean a thing.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Lay my head on the railroad line. The train came along; pacifying my mind. ”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

. . . . . . . . . .

“Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“The best thing she was, was her children.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

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“What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”

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“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.”

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“Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”

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“Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don’t get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”

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“More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”

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“It was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.”

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“Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

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“You just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.”

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About the Author (Toni Morrison):

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2001 she was named one of “The 30 Most Powerful Women in America” by Ladies Home Journal.