About Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987).
She did not look away. When Toni Morrison’s clear imagining gaze met uncomfortable things, she faced them down.
In her magnificence | Obituary: Toni Morrison
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Especially she did not look away from the images of slavery she had been slowly, painfully dragged towards by the time she wrote “Beloved”, in 1987.
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Hers was a work to reclaim lost black voices. Slaves in wagons singing under their breath, ghosts and haints staring silently from tree stumps, ancestors whose names were hidden in children’s chants.
The Economist Aug 15th 2019
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 was awarded to Toni Morrison “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.“
Nobel Lecture
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture is a must read. There’s also an audio recording available on this link.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
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Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.
Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison Quotes
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
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.
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
― Toni Morrison
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
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.
― Toni Morrison
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, Song of Solomon
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
― Toni Morrison
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
― Toni Morrison
Books by Toni Morrison
Beloved
India | International
Song of Solomon
India | International
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