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Toni Morrison

Geburtstag: 18. Februar 1931

Toni Morrison ist eine amerikanische Schriftstellerin. Sie zählt zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der afroamerikanischen Literatur und erhielt 1993 den Literaturnobelpreis.

Zitate Toni Morrison

„Der Afrikanismus ist das Vehikel, durch das sich das amerikanische Ich als nicht versklavt, sondern frei erfährt, als nicht abstoßend, sondern begehrenswert, nicht hilflos, sondern priviligiert und mächtig, nicht geschichtslos sondern geschichtlich, nicht verdammt, sondern unschuldig, nicht ein blinder Zufall der Evolution, sondern fortschrittliche Erfüllung eines Schicksal.“

— Toni Morrison
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Über Schicksal

„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.“

— Toni Morrison

„Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.“

— Toni Morrison, Jazz

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

— Toni Morrison

„Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.“

— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Context: Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. Guitar to Milkman on why a male peacock can't fly much better than a chicken. Song of Solomon (1977)

„Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.“

— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Context: Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. <!-- ~ Ch. 9

„Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.“

— Toni Morrison, Beloved

„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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.“

— Toni Morrison
Tar Baby (1981).

„She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.“

— Toni Morrison, Beloved

„Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.“

— Toni Morrison, Beloved

„And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.“

— Toni Morrison

„Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.“

— Toni Morrison, Beloved

„Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.“

— Toni Morrison, Sula

„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.“

— Toni Morrison
Context: 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.

„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
Context: 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. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

„It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too.“

— Toni Morrison
Context: It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too. I thought if I removed the word from nearly every other place in the manuscript, it could become an earned word. If I could give the word, in my very modest way, its girth and its meaning and its terrible price and its clarity at the moment when that is all there is time for, then the title does work for me. On the title of her book Love (2003), in [http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/200311/omag_200311_toni_b.jhtml O, The Oprah Magazine (November 2003)]