toni morrison

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Im not entangled in shaping my work according to other peoples views of how I should have done it. ”

“ Maybe I care about language because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little. ”

“ Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation. ”

“ Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined. ”

“ Whats the world for you if you cant make it up the way you want it? ”

“ Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom. ”

“ The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over. ”

“ My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. ”