| "Nuns go by as quiet as lust..."
"Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound,
curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged
by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their
words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and
all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter -- like the throb of
a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions
is always clear to Frieda and me. 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."
"[Claudia finds herself] longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without "a thin
di-ime to my name." I looked forward to the delicious time when "my
man" would leave me, when I would "hate to see that evening sun go
down..."' cause then I would know "my man has left this town." Misery
colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all the grief
out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only
endurable, it was sweet."
I have to read The Bluest Eye at least three more times.
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