The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Beloved I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
Toni Morrison
Born (1931-02-18) February 18, 1931 (age 81) Lorain, Ohio, United States Occupation Novelist, Writer Genres African American literature Notable work(s) Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988 Favorite Authors Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
I often think about rewriting or continuing the life of particular characters in subsequent books, but I have found that it's a kind of trap because you never really go on to another topic. TONI MORRISON, Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998 The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects. TONI MORRISON, Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
Winter: Chapter 5 Summary
This chapter describes in detail a particular type of black woman. She comes from some small, rural town in the South, full of natural beauty, where everyone has a job. She takes special care of her body and her clothes. She goes to a land-grant college and learns how to do the work reserved for her, the care and feeding of white people, with grace and good manners. She marries and bears the children of a man who knows that she will take good care of his house and his clothes. But she also is a tyrant over her home and over her own body. She does not enjoy sex. She feels affection only for the household cat, which is as neat and quiet as she is. She caresses and cuddles the cat in a way that she refuses to caress or cuddle her family. Then such a woman enters the novel. Her name is Geraldine, she is married to a man named Louis, and they have a son named Junior. Geraldine takes excellent physical care of Junior, but early on, he understands that she feels real affection only for the cat. In response, he tortures the cat and torments children who come to play at the nearby school playground. Junior would have liked to have played with the black children, but his mother will let him play only with upper-class “colored” people, not lower-class “niggers.”
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
TONI MORRISON QUOTES
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 Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. TONI MORRISON, Paradise
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
In this country American means white. The Guardian, Jan. 29, 1992 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. TONI MORRISON, interview with Don Swaim, 1987
The Mid-Autumn Festival
恭 贺 中 秋
Nobel Lecture, 1993
“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. “ We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. “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.”