Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

From Level 4 I have found that I am a very research based illustrator. I need quotes or words as ammunition to begin creating and visually exploring, therefore I have been extracting quotes out of my reading. However, some of these quotes are not for the purpose of necessarily illustrating but they portray reoccurring themes, are crucial to the storyline or are things of interest/relatable to me.

I struggle with reading and therefore began reading as soon as we were set this summer brief as I have to tackle reading in very small chunks and have been trying to read a few pages every day.

I have also been chipping away with illustrating some of the imagery from the books which has made me really process the content and themes.

I began reading Beloved because I realised it was the first one of a trilogy of books but quickly lost steam with the story line. I then decided to read The Bluest Eye and have really enjoyed it although each chapter takes a few pages to understand who it is focused upon...

Quotes

I know we were only supposed to find 5 quotes but for me to understand the book I needed to pick out quotes throughout...

Beloved

‘the sons Howard and Buglar had run away by the time they were 13 years old’

‘Baby Suggs, Grandmother, Sethe; their mother and their little sister Denver all by themselves in the grey white house on Bluestone Road’

‘Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for colour’

‘Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124’

‘Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her-remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys’

Paul D-Sweet Home men, Kentucky, Peachstone skin, straight backed

‘All you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling’

Sethe ‘I cook at a restauranat in town. And I saw a little on the sly’

‘Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of them’ (P12)

‘In their 20s, fucking cows, dreaming of rape’

‘someone her mother wanted to talk to and would even consider talking to while barefoot’ (Denver lonely with no one to play with-so much loss)

‘lonely and rebuked ghost’

This freaks me out a little bit in that sewing produces a similar texture to how I imagine whip marks would be. That you can touch them and that they have gone into your surface. Once I had finished I found myself tracing my hands over her back, similarly to how Morrison described Paul D to do...

‘I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house’

‘School teacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree’

‘they beat you and you was pregnant?’

‘he would tolerate no piece until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth’ (p21)

‘the top of her dress was around her hips’

‘holding the table by 2 legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything’

‘Paul D dropped 25 years from recent memory’

‘that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked’

‘Paul D saw the foot of her breasts and disliked it, the spread away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely live without’

Bluest Eye

‘some victims of powerful self loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over’

‘other surrender their identity; melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack’

‘some who collapse, silently, anonymously, (..)they are invisible’

‘they could not save their friends from the world she broke’

‘how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root in the most delicate member of society; a child.’

‘cause a child to literally fall apart’

‘could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into and interrogation for themselves for the smashing’

‘Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt’ (opening page)

‘some men are just dogs’

‘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’

‘all the world had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here” they said, “this” is beautiful’ (p14 description)

p15 X-mas wish experience

‘three quarters of milk’ (Pecola drunk)

‘I began to concentrate on the white spots on my fingernails. The total signified the number of boyfriends I would have. Seven.’

‘Suddenly Pecola bolted straight up, her eyes wide with terror (…) Blood running down her legs (…) It just means you can have a baby!’

Pizza Parlour---- ‘slow-footed teen-aged boys huddles about the corner. These young boys met there to deel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrage’

Pecola and Sammy Breedlove: eyes small and close together, narrow forhead, low irregular hairlines, straight heavy eyebrows-nearly met, crooked flat noses, insolent nostrils, high cheek bones, ears turned forward, shapely lips

‘cloak of ugliness to wear’

‘she needed Cholly’s sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became’

Page 32-33 Cholly VS Mrs. Breedlove

‘those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights (…) we mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’

‘Nobody loves a dandelion (…) They are ugly. They are weeds’

‘Three Whores lived in the apartments above the Breedloves store front’

(Miss Marie-large, China-bangs and curling hair, Poland-singing)

‘Three merry gargoyles’

‘Three merry harridans’

Maureen Peal – long brown braids patent leather shoes with buckles, yellow fluffy jumper, tucked into pleated skirt, brightly coloured knew socks with white trim, brown velvet coat trimmed with white rabbit fur, green eyes, 6 fingers (stumps)

‘visualised her falling off a cliff’

‘I didn’t say father. I just said naked men (…) how come you said father’

‘they have the eyes of people who can tell what time it is by the colours of the sky’

Sugar brown mobile girls: part hair on the side, curl it in paper from brown bags, tie a print scar around their heads, sleep with their hands folded across their stomachs

‘how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passions, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions’

‘she will give him her body sparingly and partially. He must enter her surreptitiously, lifting the hem of her nightgown only to her navel’

‘while he moves inside her she will wonder why they didn’t put the necessary but private parts of the body in some more convenient place- like the armpit for example, or the palm of the hand’

‘coloured people were neat and quiet, niggers were dirty and loud’

white shirts, blue trousers, shaved head ‘he snatched the cat by one of its hind legs and began to wing it around his head in a circle’

Pecola on the floor, dirty torn dress, plaits sticking out of head, muddy shoes, soiled socks, safety pins holding dress up

‘they beat us differently in the spring. Instead of the dull pains of a winter strap, there were these new green switchers that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous meanness in those long twigs’

‘over her shoulder she spit out words to us like rotten pieces of apple’

‘with which a rusty nail was met when it punched clear through her foot during her second year of life’

‘a way of lifting the bad foot as through she were extracting it from little whirl pools that threatened to pull it under’

‘she listened carefully to the music and let it pull her lips into a smile’

tooth falling out-stump

‘the sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for the clothes and make-up she merely wanted other women to cast favourable glances her way’

‘to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty’

‘I be hanging wash and I knowed lifting weren’t good for it. I’d say to it holt on now I gone hang up these few rags, don’t get froggy, it be over soon’

‘she was the queen of canned vegetables’

Page 102 ‘then I feel like Im laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colours (…) I don’t want to take my mind offen the rainbow’

‘There is sure to be a glory, only thing I miss sometimes is that rainbow’

‘When Cholly was 4 days old, his mother wrapped him in 2 blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad’

Aunt Jimmy beat her with a Razor Strap

‘Lifted the melon high over his head and the melon blotted out the sun’

‘Arms higher than the pines’

‘They hugged the memories of illness to their bosoms’

‘The gentle teasing they had been engaged in with each other changed to bitchiness, a serious kind of making fun’

‘Suddenly he realised that Aunt Jimmy was dead, for he missed the fear of being whipped’

P115 Cholly sleeping with Darlene

‘He searched the faces and saw only eyes, pleading eyes, cold eyes, eyes gone flat with malice, others laced with fear’

‘His reactions were based on what he felt in the moment’

‘She was a child-unburdened-why wasn’t she happy? The clear statement of her misery was an accusation’

‘The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him’

‘Once there was an old man who loved things, for the slightest contact with people produced him in a faint but persistent nausea (…) “misanthrope”’

‘All in all his personality was an arabesque: intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constrained’

‘The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts-all natural erections and protections the body was capable of-disquieted him’

‘And since he was too dividend to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls’

‘he equated love making with communion and the Holy Grail’

‘The dog gagged, his mouth chomping air, and promptly fell down (…) Choking, stumbling, he moved like a broken toy around the yard’

‘She (Velma) left me the way people leave a hotel room’

‘Let’s ask Him to let Pecola’s baby live and promise to be good for a month’

‘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 fulfilment’

‘But suppose my eyes aren’t blue enough’

‘Love is never any better than the lover’

THEMES:

• Paedophilia and rape
• Un-enjoyment of sex and unhappy marriages (and broken upbringings)
• Colour as a reoccurring motif
• Poverty +Survival
• Violence and whipping
• Men portraying in bad light
• Ugliness VS BeautyVS Race
• Bad treatment of pets
• Reasons/explanations/analysis of why characters act as they do
• Youth VS Growing up

MOTIFS:

Seeds- growth, hope, nurture, youth

Eye-seeing, appearances, "outside gaze", judgement, society, beauty/ugliness

AUTHOR: