The Beautiful and Fierce Wisdom, Courage, and Love of Toni Morrison

In honor of Toni Morrison. May she continue to inspire

us all. May the beauty, courage, resilience, wisdom,

and love of her legacy live on in each of us.
❤ Molly

Bearing Witness to the World As It Is

and As It Should Be

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

 

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one. 

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.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for. 

 

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.

 

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.

 

Your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

*****

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem. 

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

  

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things. 

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.

   

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them. 

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race — scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism. 

If you take racism away from certain people — I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist — if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are. 

  

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

  

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.  

  

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? Or would you take it?  

***** 

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

  

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake — otherwise it just walks on in your door.

  

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — that's what's useful for art.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. 

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down. 

  

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

  

The function of freedom is to free someone else. 

  

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind — happiness — I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one. 

  

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. 

  

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve — because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

 

All important things are hard.

 

Being able to laugh got me through. 

 

Let your face speak what's in your heart.  

— Toni Morrison