Top 40 Nella Larsen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”

— Nella Larsen

2. “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

3. “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

— Nella Larsen

4. “Everything can’t be explained by some general biological phrase.”

— Nella Larsen

5. “Children aren’t everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.”

— Nella Larsen

6. “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”

— Nella Larsen

7. “I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”

— Nella Larsen

8. “I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.”

— Nella Larsen

9. “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

10. “Have you ever stopped to think how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.”

— Nella Larsen

11. “What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”

— Nella Larsen

12. “Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too.”

— Nella Larsen

13. “But it’s true, ‘Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ‘Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.”

— Nella Larsen

14. “I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel anymore.”

— Nella Larsen

15. “She could neither conform nor be happy in her unconformity. This she saw clearly now, and with cold anger at all the past futile effort. What a waste!”

— Nella Larsen

16. “It’s only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of nature.”

— Nella Larsen

17. “It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.”

— Nella Larsen

18. “And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its color, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.”

— Nella Larsen

19. “Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”

— Nella Larsen

20. “I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”

— Nella Larsen

21. “She laughed and the ringing bells in her laugh had a hard metallic sound.”

— Nella Larsen

22. “If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have gone on to the end, never seeing any of you. But that did something to me, and I’ve been so lonely since! You can’t know. Not close to a single soul. Never anyone to really talk to.”

— Nella Larsen

23. “As if aware of her desire and her hesitation, Clare remarked thoughtfully: “You know, ‘Rene, I’ve often wondered why more colored girls, girls like you and Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and – oh, lots of others – never ‘passed’ over.”

— Nella Larsen

24. “It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.”

— Nella Larsen

25. “And mingled with her disbelief and resentment was another feeling, a question. Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ignorant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin? Why had she allowed him to make his assertions and express his misconceptions undisputed? Why, simply because of Clare Kendry, who had exposed her to such torment, had she failed to take up the defense of the race to which she belonged?”

— Nella Larsen

26. “No, certainly he didn’t. Not actually. He couldn’t, not very well, since he didn’t know. But he would have. It amounts to the same thing. And I’m sure it was just as unpleasant.”

— Nella Larsen

27. “Almost she wished she could die. Not quite. It wasn’t that she was afraid of death, which had, she thought, its picturesque aspects. It was rather that she knew she would not die. And death, after the debacle, would but intensify its absurdity. Also, it would reduce her, Helga Crane, to unimportance, to nothingness. Even in her unhappy present state, that did not appeal to her.”

— Nella Larsen

28. “You knew what his opinion of you was, while he – Well, ’twas ever thus. We know, always have. They don’t. Not quite. It has, you will admit, its humorous side, and sometimes, its conveniences.”

— Nella Larsen

29. “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. Her religion was to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality.”

— Nella Larsen

30. “Authors do not supply imaginations...”

— Nella Larsen

31. “She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.”

— Nella Larsen

32. “Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.”

— Nella Larsen

33. “In some strange way she was able to ignore the atmosphere of self-satisfaction which poured from him like gas from a leaking pipe.”

— Nella Larsen

34. “New York’s the lonesomest place in the world if you don’t know anybody.”

— Nella Larsen

35. “And she was interesting, an odd confusion of wit and intense earnestness; a vivid and remarkable person.”

— Nella Larsen

36. “Yet she had continued to try not only to teach but to befriend those happy singing children, whose charm and distinctiveness the school was so surely ready to destroy.”

— Nella Larsen

37. “Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.”

— Nella Larsen

38. “What right, she kept demanding of herself, had Clare Kendry to expose her, or even Gertrude Martin, to such humiliation, such downright insult?”

— Nella Larsen

39. “Frankly the question came to this: what was the matter with her? Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn’t she be happy, content, somewhere Other people managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn’t she know how? Was she incapable of it?”

— Nella Larsen

40. “The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy, of God.”

— Nella Larsen

41. “Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.”

— Nella Larsen

42. “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the houses of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.”

— Nella Larsen

43. “Her reason partly agreed, her instinct wholly rebelled.”

— Nella Larsen

44. “I have imagined Helga Crane as a dancer or, like Larsen herself, a writer, but one who would find a way to devise a more satisfying ending than the script the world had handed her.”

— Nella Larsen

45. “The far-off interest of tears.”

— Nella Larsen