The Bluest Eye
By: Toni Morrison
"The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement." (23)
It's interesting how Shirley Temple's last name is Temple, since so many people worshipped her.
"We didn't initiate talk with grown-ups, we answered their questions." (23)
"How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?" (32)
"The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar. People had owned it, but never known it." (35)
"But the unquarreled evening hung like the first note of a dirge in sullenly expectant air." (41)
"Try as she might, she could never get her eyes to disappear. So what was the point? They were everything." (45)
"Outside, Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb." (50)
"Anger is better. THere is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of both." (50)
"What did love feel like? she wondered.... Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence." (57)
"We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom. We raised our children and reared our crops; we let infants grow, and property develop. Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womandhood by acquiescene. And the smell of your fruit and the labor of your days we abhorred." (177)
"Tell me, Lord, how could you leave a lass so long so lone that she could find her way to me? How could you? I weep for you, Lord. And it is because I weep for you that I had to do your work for you." (180)
"Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us - not then." (191)
"And the years folded up like pocket hankerchiefs." (205)
"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us thik we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her fraility and yawned in the fantasy of our strength." (205)
"And fantasy it was, we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to stimulate maturity; we arranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word. She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end." (205-206)
"Love is never better than the lover." (206)
"And now when I see her searching the garbage - for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds this year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to love. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late." (206)