Sunday, December 11, 2016

Toni Morrison

On language

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

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.