Toni Morrison
American writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. Song of Solomon (1977) (last page)
Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his his own that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
I would have known right away who you was when the sun blotted out your face the way it did when I took you to the grape arbor. I would have known at once when my water broke. And when I did see your face it had more than a hint of what you would look like after all these years. I would have known who you were right away because the cup after cup of water you drank proved and connected to the fact that you dribbled clear spit on my face the day I got to 124. I would have known right off, but Paul D distracted me. Otherwise I would have seen my fingernail prints right there on your forehead for all the world to see. From when I held your head up, out in the shed. And later on, when you asked me about the earrings I used to dangle for you to play with, I would have recognized you right off, except for Paul D.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there you who never was there if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over over and done with it's going to always be there waiting for you.
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.
She had been so close, then closer. And it was so much better than the anger that ruled when Sethe did or thought anything that excluded herself. She could bear the hours nine or ten of them each day but one when Sethe was gone. Bear even the nights when she was close but out of sight, behind walls and doors lying next to him. But now even the daylight time that Beloved had counted on, disciplined herself to be content with, was being reduced, divided by Sethe's willingness to pay attention to other things. Him mostly.
This is not a story to pass on.
She is a friend of my mind... The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
It is easily the most empty clichι, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion because hatred is involved in it, too. I thought if I removed the word from nearly every other place in the manuscript, it could become an earned word. If I could give the word, in my very modest way, its girth and its meaning and its terrible price and its clarity at the moment when that is all there is time for, then the title does work for me.
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.