Toni Morrison

The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old African American girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.

The Bluest Eye

lara

Pecola turned to find the front door and saw Jesus looking down at her with sad and unsurprised eyes, his long brown hair parted in the middle, the gay paper flowers twisted around his face.

The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.

To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversation from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned so 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.

My sister comes in. Her eyes are full of sorrow. She sings to me: "When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, someone thinks of me...." I doze, thinking of plums, walls and "someone" 

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.

 wen

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do

𓂃 𓈒𓏸

“Along 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. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the 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.”

Élise

“So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

“We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.”

I want to throw up. The story was so gut wrenching, it makes me sick. Toni Morrison did so well! The characters are -almost all of them- so repelling, wow.

The Bluest Eye

Reviews

Highlights