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Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.
Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it.
There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Nuns go by as quiet as lust,
So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.
We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.
We loved him. Even after what came later, there was no bitterness in our memory of him.
The best hiding place was love.
My mother’s fussing soliloquies always irritated and depressed us. They were interminable, insulting, and although indirect (Mama never named anybody—just talked about folks and some people), extremely painful in their thrust. She would go on like that for hours, connecting one offense to another until all of the things that chagrined her were spewed out.
Misery colored 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.
She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires.
For some reason Cholly had not hated the white men; he hated, despised, the girl.
She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish that she herself could die.
“Please, God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand. “Please make me disappear.”
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.
It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth.
why she never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace.
The songs caressed her, and while she tried to hold her mind on the wages of sin, her body trembled for redemption, salvation, a mysterious rebirth that would simply happen, with no effort on her part.
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.
He must never seed no mare foal. Who say they don’t have no pain? Just ’cause she don’t cry? ’Cause she can’t say it, they think it ain’t there? If they looks in her eyes and see them eyeballs lolling back, see the sorrowful look, they’d know.
She was older now, with no time for dreams and movies. It was time to put all of the pieces together, make coherence where before there had been none. The children gave her this need; she herself was no longer a child. 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.
Holding Cholly as a model of sin and failure, she bore him like a crown of thorns, and her children like a cross.
into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life.
But I can’t. Not until he does. Not until I feel him loving me. Just me. Sinking into me. Not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his mind. That he couldn’t stop if he had to. That he would die
Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” White men said, “Come here.” Black men said, “Lay down.” The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other.
His feelings about her were mostly fear—fear that she would not like him, and fear that she would.
Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him.
His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.
It seemed to him that lonely was much better than alone.
The sunshine dropped like honey on his head.
And then the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin.
Nothing, nothing, interested him now. Not himself, not other people. Only in drink was there some break, some floodlight, and when that closed, there was oblivion.
If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him—the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn’t she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?
Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womanhood by acquiescence. And the smell of your fruit and the labor of your days we abhorred.
We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.
She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end.
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 loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.