#thelitbit // The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

How does one’s definition of beauty, race, class, worth, the list goes on - as taught to you by culture and as influenced by the stories & experiences of those around you - affect your life and your mindset? This novel follows sisters Claudia and Frieda and their schoolmate Pecola through this journey.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Noteworthy excerpts:

"She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition––the glazed separateness…All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes."

"She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen…It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate."

"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."

“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 live.”

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