Profound passages from The Bluest Eye

Background: I'm reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye right now (Nobel Prize for Literature). I liked some insights on several passages about race, class, discrimination, poverty and private property. And I'm going to quote them here.

I hope someday I can write socially relevant stories without romanticizing anyone. Right now I am working on an original fiction which still remains stuck as of present.

The following lines are uttered by the character Claudia, who serves as narrator of the story.

"Our peripheral existence, however, was something we learned to deal with — probably because it was abstract. But the concreteness of being outdoors was another matter — like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead."

"Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership."

"Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs — all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child wanted."

"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 [Shirley Temple], just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement."

"We didn't initiate talks with grown-ups; we answered their questions."