#toni morrison

[why-are-you-asking-me]

More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[withinsight-motivation]

[tholdones]

[perfectquote]

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

[apologize-to-no-one]

[kikisloane]

“Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”

-Toni Morrison

[putah-creek]

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison

[kamreadsandrecs]

Namwali Serpell and Tracy K. Smith Discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Namwali Serpell kicks off the tour for her new book On Morrison at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, MA, in conversation with poet Tracy