Notable quotes by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who died Monday at age 88

Toni Morrison’s novels included The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and its sequel, Jazz. Here are some quotes by the acclaimed author.

Notable quotes by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who died Monday at age 88

FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2013 file photo, author Toni Morrison signs copies of her latest book "Home," during Google's online program series, Authors At Google, in New York. The Nobel Prize-winning author has died. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Morrison died Monday, Aug. 5, 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was 88. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File) (AP)

* “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” from a 1981 speech to the Ohio Arts Council.

* “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind — wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place,” from her novel Beloved, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

FILE - In this Sept. 1987 file photo, author Toni Morrison poses with a copy of her book "Beloved" in New York. Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday, Aug. 5, 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.(AP Photo/David Bookstaver, File)

* “Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’,” from her 2019 book The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations.

* “It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas,” from her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.

* “If you surrender to the air, you could ride it,” the final words from her 1977 novel Song of Solomon.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

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