Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize winning author best known for her eleven fiction novels including Song of Solomon. It's a rare treat that we get a peek inside her non-fiction writings: those of hopes, warm memories, private encounters and learnings. Ever so poetic this read encompasses selected essays, speeches and meditations by a rare talent highly recognized and revered by both her collogues and the public for her work. To me, everything she writes, fiction or non-fiction, sounds like poetry dedicated to the object of her affection...that object: each and every reader consuming the page. See below for six of my favorite quotes from this collection (in no particular order).
I am looking forward to hearing what you think about this book. As always, when you are finished reading, connect with me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook to let me know your thoughts, questions and/or comments. I love hearing from you all!
What book would you recommend I read next?
For delightful reads by this author click the links below:
xoxoxoxoxox -Happy reading my friends,
RTOR
"But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of "I" and choose the open spaces of "we".
-Moral Inhabitants
"Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last...Its [art] conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely."
-The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
"Know the difference between fever and the disease."
-Moral Inhabitants
"The point is, the form (Greek tragedy [writings]) makes available these varieties of provocative love because it is masterly -not because the civilization that is its referent was flawless or superior to all others."
-Unspeakable Things Unspoken, The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
"Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified, refined. Or what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
-God's Language
"I once wrote an article for a popular magazine that had a small irregular "arts" section. They wanted something laudatory about the value of perhaps just the pleasure of reading. This last noun, 'pleasure,' annoyed me because it is routinely associated with emotion: delight accompanied by suspense. Reading is fundamental -emphasis on the 'fun'. At least, of course, it is understood, in popular discourse, to be uplifting, instructive; at its best encouraging deep thought."
-Invisible Ink, Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading