Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

- Toni Morrison

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

~Toni Morrison

remember when toni morrison wrote the most tender and hopeful meditation on parenting and motherhood

Summer, Somewhere // Danez Smith,

Injustice Case, 1970 // David Hammons,

Summer, Somewhere // Danez Smith,

Evening Rendezvous, 1962 // Norman Lewis

Beloved, Toni Morrison

XXX // Kendrick Lamar ft. U2

The Music or the Misery // Hanif Abdurraquib

Yesterday // Noname

The Box, Roddy Ricch

Emperor Menelik II, renouncing Italy’s claims to Ethiopia, 1893

TONI MORRISON - THE FOREIGNER’S HOME

We’re attached!

My heart hurts for all the Black mothers who have lost their children to police violence and brutality who are then told: we see no problem with our officer killing your child.

It’s fucking insane. It hurts me so deeply.

I can’t even talk about it. My eyes can’t take it. My chest hurts. I can’t. I can’t. I cannot.

But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind.

Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Down in the grass, like the snake she believed she was, Sethe opened her mouth, and instead of fangs and a split tongue, out shot the truth.”

Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved again for an essay. Her words are magic.

ig: rhiharper

toni morrison

"...one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” That was what he said. This was what I heard: 1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. 2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. 3. Your real life is with us, your family. 4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home."

Toni Morrison

“Love is divine only and difficult always.” – Toni Morrison, Paradise

"The act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding."

—Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory"

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Genre: Magical Realism, Historical Fiction

Page Count: 324

Read for: Reading against Racism - 20th and 21st Century Literary Activism

This book is amazing. Beautiful prose and intensely haunting imagery. I had to read this before the start of the new semester for my "Reading against Racism" Seminar and it has made me very excited for that class.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

Toni Morrison, Sula

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

When I read the bluest eye ( by Toni Morrison) I loved how one of the characters demonstrated martyrdom. I often feel that this type of behaviour goes unchecked because it disrupts a sense of self for the victim to exist.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon