A Toni Morrison appreciation post.
Toni Morrison has been a gift to literature. I read the Bluest Eye and there was no turning back. I was immediately sold and I knew I had to read everything by her. I'm tempted to just consume all her work now but I think it's best to drip feed myself instead since there's a limited supply of her work.
There's something about her writing thats direct and hard hitting. She has profound and important things to say about everything-race, love (of one's self and others), power, isolation and the list goes on. When I'm in the mood to read a good book, a book I know I will enjoy- I turn to Toni. I don't think of her books as works that I've read, I think of them as journeys that I've experienced.
I could quote her forever, so here are some of my favourites by her so far:
"You are your best thing."
"He can't value you more than you value yourself."
"Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. "
"What you do to children matters. And they might never forget" "Correct what you can. Learn from what you can't."
"You can do some rather extraordinary things if that is what you really believe."
"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined. "
"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
"Her passions were narrow but deep."
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him."
"You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
“Love is never any better than the lover. ”
“Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”
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