The Bluest Eye Quotes

Autumn

There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with—probably because it was abstract. But the concreteness of being outdoors was another matter—like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Dead doesn’t change, and outdoors in here to stay.
Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses.
How strong was their outrage. Tears threatened to erase the aloofness of their authority. The emotion of years of unfulfilled longing preened in their voices. I did not know why I destroyed those dolls. But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfil my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up, “I want to sit on the low stool on Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.
If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be a grown without “a thin di-i-ime to my name.”…Misery coloured by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Then Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?”
And the joylessness stank, pervading everything. …Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.
If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would never have forgiven Jesus. She needed Cholly’s sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task began. In the name of Jesus.
No less did Cholly need her. She was one of the few things abhorrent to him he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact.
“Please God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand. “Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was the hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left.
Try as she might, she could never get her eyes to disappear. So what was the point? They were everything. Everything was there, in them. All of those pictures, all of those faces
As long as she looked the way she did, as long as she was ugly, she would have to stay with these people. Somehow she belonged to them. Long hours she sat looking at the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her despised or ignored at school, by teachers and classmates alike.
- when one of the girls at school wanted to be particularly insulting to a boy, or wanted to get an immediate response from him, she could say. “Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove! Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove!” and never fail to get peals of laughter from those in earshot, and mock anger from the accused.
- It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.
- If she looked different, beautiful, may be Cholly would be different, and Mrs Breedlove too.
- Every night, without fail she prayed for blue eyes
- Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
while walking to the grocery stores, she notices the dandelions and thinks about how pretty they are and how reviled. she notices the cracked and old and even sidewalk, the newer beautiful ones being bumpy, and screechy for skateboards
somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back hesitate and hover. at some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. he does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.
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. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. 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.
Pecola unfolds her fist, showing the three pennies. He scoots three Mary Janes toward her—three yellow rectangles in each packet. She holds the money toward him. He hesitates, not wanting to touch her hand. She does not know how to move the finger of her right hand from the display counter or how to get the coins out of her left hand. Finally he reaches over and takes the pennies from her hand. His nails graze her damp palm.
Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do notlook at her and do not send love back. She thinks, “They are ugly. They are weeds.” Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging. Her thoughts fall back to Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes, his phlegmy voice. The anger will not hold; the puppy is too easily surfeited. Its thirst too quickly quenched, it sleeps. The shame wells up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into her eyes. What to do before the tears come. She remembers the Mary Janes

Winter

Maureen: She enchanted the entire school. When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls; white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls’ toilet, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids. She never had to search for anybody to eat with in the cafeteria—they flocked to the table of her choice, where she opened fastidious lunches, shaming our jelly-stained bread with egg-salad sandwiches cut into four dainty squares, pink-frosted cupcakes, stocks of celery and carrots, proud, dark apples. She even bought and liked white milk. Frieda and I were bemused, irritated, and fascinated by her. We looked hard for flaws to restore our equilibrium, but had to be content at first with uglying up her name, changing Maureen Peal to Meringue Pie. Later a minor epiphany was ours when we discovered that she had a dog tooth—a charming one to be sure—but a dog tooth nonetheless. And when we found out that she had been born with six fingers on each hand and that there was a little bump where each extra one had been removed, we smiled. They were small triumphs, but we took what we could get—snickering behind her back andcalling her Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie. But we had to do it alone, for none of the other girls would cooperate with our hostility. They adored her.
It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They 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. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.
Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”
Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.
If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us
Pecola rubbed the cat’s head; he whined, his tongue flicking with pleasure. The blue eyes in the black face held her.

Spring

“I told Mama, and she told Daddy, and we all come home, and he was gone, so we waited for him, and when Daddy saw him come up on the porch, he threw our old tricycle at his head and knocked him off the porch.” “Did he die?” “Naw. He got up and started singing ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ Then Mama hit him with a broom and told him to keep the Lord’s name out of his mouth, but he wouldn’t stop, and Daddy was cussing, and everybody was screaming.”
“No she ain’t. Besides, she can’t do nothing but whip us.” That was true. She wouldn’t kill us, or laugh a terrible laugh at us, or throw a bottle at us.
Whatever portable plurality she found, she organized into neat lines, according to their size, shape, or gradations of color.
A kind of city-street music where laughter belies anxiety, and joy is as short and straight as the blade of a pocketknife.
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. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
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.
There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly.
So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.
More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows. Here her foot flopped around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven sound. Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise.
Into her son she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life.
Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. Free to sleep in doorways or between the white sheets of a singing woman. Free to take a job, free to leave it. He could go to jail and not feel imprisoned, for he had already seen the furtiveness in the eyes of his jailer, free to say, “No, suh,” and smile, for he had already killed three white men. Free to take a woman’s insults, for his body had already conquered hers. Free even to knock her in the head, for he had already cradled that head in his arms. Free to be gentle when she was sick, or mop her floor, for she knew what and where his maleness was. He was free to drink himself into a sillyhelplessness, for he had already been a gandy dancer, done thirty days on a chain gang, and picked a woman’s bullet out of the calf of his leg. He was free to live his fantasies, and free even to die, the how and the when of which held no interest for him. In those days, Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him.
But the aspect of married life that dumbfounded him and rendered him totally disfunctional was the appearance of children. Having no idea of how to raise children, and having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a relationship should be. Had he been interested in the accumulation of things, he could have thought of them as his material heirs; had he needed to prove himself to some nameless “others,” he could have wanted them to excel in his own image and for his own sake. Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was, he reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment.
Soaphead pursed his lips, and let his tongue stroke a gold inlay. He thought it was at once the most fantastic and the most logical petition he had ever received. Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding swept through him, but was quickly replaced by anger. Anger that he was powerless to help her. Of all the wishes people had brought him— money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles. Never before had he really wanted the true and holy power—only the power to make others believe he had it. It seemed so sad, so frivolous, that mere mortality, not judgment, kept him from it. Or did it?
Summer
- “She be lucky if it don’t live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.”
  “Can’t help but be. Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like
  that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground.”
- Our astonishment was short-lived, for it gave way to a curious kind of
  defensive shame; we were embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we
  just felt sorry for her. Our sorrow drove out all thoughts of the new bicycle.
  And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed
  to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited
  by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl,” or,
  “Poor baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should
  have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.
- More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone
  to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white
  baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals
- Or
  maybe we didn’t remember; we just knew. We had defended ourselves since
  memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be
  broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become
  headstrong, devious and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid
  very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not
  then. Our only handicap was our size; people gave us orders because they
  were bigger and stronger. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity and
  pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a human life.
- Mrs. Breedlove look drop-eyed at you?
  Yes. Now she does. Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me
  all of the time. Do you suppose she’s jealous too?
  Could be. They are pretty, you know.
  I know. He really did a good job. Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at
  somebody, they look off.
  Is that why nobody has told you how pretty they are?
  Sure it is. Can you imagine? Something like that happening to a person,
  and nobody but nobody saying anything about it? They all try to pretend they
  don’t see them. Isn’t that funny?…I said, isn’t that funny?
- So it was.
  A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the
  horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.
- The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days,
  walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a
  drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she
  flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly.
  Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could
  not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind.
- 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 think 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 frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our
  strength.
  And fantasy it was, for 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 simulate maturity; we rearranged 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.
- Oh, some of us “loved” her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I’m
  sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her,
  envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the
  something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. 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.

Sublime

The Unruly Genius of Joyce Carol Oates

Le département de musique (Suspense t. 241)

Laurie (Flash Relatos)

Going Home with Wendell Berry

Cut and Thirst: A Short Story

Eileen

The Poet: A Novel

Tana French • The Likeness

Julie Otsuka • The Buddha in the Attic