Sublime

Only with Africanist characters is such a project thinkable: delayed gratification for the pleasure of a (white) child.

Jacaranda could never imagine it; she thought it was for people with something extra inside them, or something less—she never knew it was for her.

East Tremont was a sense of continuity, of warmth, of the security that comes—and only comes—with a sense of belonging.

The firm was so substantial in its reputation, its history, of fostering little-known writers that Dobson & Dalloway publishing Jacaranda was like Bach asking her to study composition with him. For Jacaranda to be accepted by them meant that she could get hit by a bus and not die.

Maud Martha loved it when her magazines said “New York,” described “good” objects there, wonderful people there, recalled fine talk, the bristling or the creamy or the tactfully shimmering ways of life. They showed pictures of rooms with wood paneling, softly glowing, touched up by the compliment of a spot of auburn here, the low burn of a rare bin

The school looked solid. Brownish-red brick, dirty cream stone trim. Massive chimney, candid, serious.

No one had this dream for me. No one held out a hand saying, Here, take this.