Toni Morrison Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, Years, Racism

  "Black Studies Center public dialogue. Pt. 2 (A Humanist View)", May 30, 1975.

• There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

  Toni Morrison

  Writing, Self, Civilization

  "In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent" by Toni Morrison, www.thenation.com. March 23, 2013.

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

  Toni Morrison

  Communication, Meaning Of Life, May

  FaceBook post by Toni Morrison from Jun 23, 2011

• Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

  Toni Morrison

  Black, Doe, Limits

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• 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 sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.

  Toni Morrison

  Sorry, Grief, Thinking

  "Toni Morrison: 'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness'" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2012.

• This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.

  Toni Morrison

  And Love, Care, Language

  Source: wordmag.com

• Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Racism, Typical

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.

  Toni Morrison

  Inspirational, Mean, Elude You

  Toni Morrison's Commencement Address to the Wellesley College Class of 2004, web.wellesley.edu. 2004.

• Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

  Toni Morrison

  Differences, Sublime, Meaning Of Life

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

  Toni Morrison

  Love, Country, Children

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving towards some other place, moving away from puny language, from all that dread into some other kind of language.

  Toni Morrison

  Moving, Confusion, World

  Source: wordmag.com

• A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Silence, Desire

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• If we had no language we'd have nothing.

  Toni Morrison

  Language, Ifs

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

  Toni Morrison

  Mother, Children, Father

• I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."

  Toni Morrison

  Use, Language, Bigs

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• 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 dumb it out, make it little.

  Toni Morrison

  Editors, Dumb, Care

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

  Toni Morrison

  Sweat, Language, Provocative

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.123, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

  Toni Morrison

  Names, Meditation, Language

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

  Toni Morrison

  War, Arrogance, Slavery

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

  Toni Morrison

  Lying, Vitality, Language

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

• We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

  Toni Morrison

  Media, Fake, News

  Source: wordmag.com

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