Sometimes, when I read her, I think of that extraordinary remark by Diane Arbus, when she described the beauty and despair she found when photographing in nudist colonies: “It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation had said, ‘All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.’ And they did.” Toni’s greatness as a novelist had a lot to do with her skill—her great ability—to show how we mucked up the landscape, not just in the world but in ourselves.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/toni-morrisons-truth