The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Toni Morrison

Wisdom – To read Toni Morrison is to swim in the fierce tides of her intellect and total command of language. A few excerpts:

“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination … A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

 

 “Do we really mean that the world is the poorer because too few appreciate the finer things? Suppose we did live in a world in which people chatted about Descartes and Kant and Lichtenstein in McDonald’s. Suppose Twelfth Night was on the best-seller list. Would we be happy? Or would we decide that since everybody appreciates it, maybe it wasn’t any good?”

 

 “Literature refuses and disrupts passive or controlled consumption of the spectacle designed to nationalize identity in order to sell us products. Literature allows us – no, demands of us – the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons.”

 From Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence, it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered, and exposed.”

 

From Toni Morrison’s eulogy for James Baldwin: “I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me were nevertheless unmistakable if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form; that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy; that ‘the world is before [me] and [I] need not to take it or leave it as it was when [I ]came in.’”