How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
No, she thought, it must be this place. The island exaggerated everything. Too much light. Too much shadow. Too much rain. Too much foliage and much too much sleep. She'd never slept so deeply in her life. (3.61)
Jade thinks that Isle des Chevaliers tends to exaggerate things because of the way it naturally creates so much rain, shadow, and light. Jeez. It sounds beautiful to us. But the truth is that the isolation of this island also gives Jade a lot of time to reflect on her life and to think about who she wants to be.
Quote #8
Before that mistakable trail, he left the unmistakable one of his smell. Like a beast who loses his animal smell after too long a diet of cooked food, a man's smell is altered by a fast. (4.188)
Of all the characters in this book, Son is the most closely connected with nature. Morrison makes this connection most strongly by comparing the natural smell of Son to that of a beast. Son's partial starvation is likewise compared to the unnatural state of an animal eating cooked people's food.
Quote #9
The young trees sighed and swayed. The women looked down from the rafters of the trees and stopped murmuring. They were delighted when first they saw her, thinking a runaway child had been restored to them. (5.461)
When Jade starts to sink in a tar pond, the trees around her seem to smile with delight at the thought that Jade might be "restored to them." This is an allusion to decomposing and going back to nature after we die. Jade is particularly "runaway," because she has distanced herself so fully from the natural world by preferring urban environments like Paris and New York.