Oprah on Toni Morrison: “Toni Morrison’s work shows us through pain all the myriad ways we can come to love,”
The Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning laureate’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf released a statement announcing Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in New York at the age of 88.
“Morrison’s novels were celebrated and embraced by booksellers, critics, educators, readers, and librarians,” the statement continued. “Her work also ignited controversy, notably in school districts that tried to ban her books. Few American writers won more awards for their books and writing.”
From Wikipedia, here is the short version of her accomplishments:
Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved (1987). The novel was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation‘s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obamapresented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Thank you Oprah for making me, and so many others aware of this amazing woman. Watch the documentary she produced about Toni Morrison, called THE PIECES I AM, which we hope is coming this way soon. Here is the trailer.
Newsweek just published this list of “Toni Morrison’s 16 Best Quotes“, because it will never be possible to choose just one…
- “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Song of Solomon
- “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
- “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Beloved
- “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
- “Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” Jazz
- “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
- “Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don’t think it’s any of that—it’s helpless … it’s absence of control—and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever.”
- “And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”
- “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
- “You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.” Song of Solomon
- “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” The Bluest Eye
- “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
- “You wanna fly, you got to give up the s**t that weighs you down.”
- “As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”
- “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
- “I tell my students, ‘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. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
Rest in peace kind soul.
Susan Saunders 8/6/19
