Toni Morrison

Others surrender their identity; melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack. Most others, however, grow beyond it.

The project, then, for this, my first book, was to enter the life of the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race.

She said she wanted blue eyes.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

also why she prayed for so radical an alteration.

The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.

Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house.

To the two who gave me life

and the one who made me free

There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information.