Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes, from The Bluest Eye. Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration the author's use of words .... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
These notes are collected in celebration of Toni Morrison's birthday: February 18, 1931 "If there is a book you want to read, that hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~ Toni Morrison
But was it (autumn) really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it - taste it - sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base - everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.
ReplyDeleteI got as much business with another mouth to feed as a cat has side pockets.
ReplyDeleteIt's as cold as a witch's tit in this house. Your whiskey ass wouldn't feel hellfire, but I'm cold. I got a lot of things to do, but I ain't got to freeze.
ReplyDeleteThey seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
ReplyDeleteThe Candy Dance was a humming, skipping, foot-tapping, eating, smacking combination that overtook us when we had sweets.
ReplyDeleteWhen she stands cooking at the table, he will circle about her shanks, and the trill of his fur spirals up her legs to her thighs, to make her fingers tremble a little in the pie dough.
ReplyDeleteThe first twigs are thin, green, and supple. They bend into a complete circle, but will not break. Their delicate, showy hopefulness shooting from forsythia and lilac bushes meant only a change in whipping style. They beat us differently in the spring. Instead of the dull pain of a winter strap, there were these new green switches that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous meanness in these long twigs that made us long for the steady stroke of a strap or the but honest slap of a hairbrush. Even now spring for me is shot through with the remembered ache of switching s and forsythia holds no cheer.
ReplyDeleteWe walked down tree-lined streets of soft gray houses leaning like tired ladies ...
ReplyDelete"Hush. Don't worry none," she whispered, and the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake.
ReplyDeleteShe thought of the death of newborn things, lonely roads, and strangers who appear out of nowhere simply to hold one's hand, woods in which the sun was always setting.
ReplyDeleteAlong with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
ReplyDeleteThe funeral banquet was a peal of joy after the thunderous beauty of the funeral. It was like a street tragedy with spontaneity tucked softly into the corners of a highly formed structure. The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.
ReplyDeleteThe residue of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he could withstand of humanity.
ReplyDeleteLove is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.
ReplyDelete