“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
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… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
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