They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their mindsโ cooled โand spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
Toni MorrisonMost of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
Toni MorrisonYou looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
Toni Morrison