These are hard times. No one can deny that. During hard times, we all can use some motivational words from an elder. Late author Toni Morrison may no longer be walking this planet, but her words and works are undoubtedly still influencing generations of writers.
Whether it’s her fictional pieces like “Beloved,” “The Bluest Eye,” and “Sula” or her personal essays such as “The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Mediatations” and “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination”—Morrison’s contribution to this word are vast and wide.
So it’s because of this, we’d like to take a moment to honor her words, her wisdom and share a handful of quotes that you might need to hear right now and every day after.
“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”
“I didn’t want to speak for Black people and I wanted to speak to, and to be among them… it’s us. So the first thing I had to do was to eliminate the white gaze.”
Toni Morrison- “Beloved”
“You are your best thing.”
Toni Morrison- “Beloved”
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
Toni Morrison- “Song of Solomon”
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Toni Morrison- “Song of Solomon”
“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.”
Toni Morrison’s 1975 Keynote Address at Portland State University
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
Toni Morrison to Her 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.”
Toni Morrison’s 1987 New York Times Article
“My world did not shrink because I was a Black female writer. It just got bigger.”
Toni Morrison- “The Source of Self-Regard”
“Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”
Toni Morrison- “The Source of Self-Regard”
“In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals, don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you.”
Toni Morrison- “Beloved”
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
Toni Morrison- “The Bluest Eye”
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
Toni Morrison- 2011 Rutgers Commencement Address
“Your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”
Toni Morrison- Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“Make up a story. 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. You…can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”
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