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What a masterful writer. This short book is a collection of a short story, an essay, and extracts from three novels (which I wish were more contextualized, but I am going to read them soon anyways). I can't recall feeling as strongly about any English prose as I do about Morrison's, how it manages to bring together poetry, and cruelty, and intricate images, and very, very deep thinking. I am clearly out of my depth when I read her and I keep her words with me, her questions too, to slowly hear her as fully as I can.

Some quotes:

"When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that change was adjustment without improvement."

"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. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, /see/ a black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary."

"Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they were lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair. they never seem to have boyfriends, but they always marry."