Toni Morrison passed away late last night, at the age of 88. May she rest in power, and may we treasure gratefully all she has written. Here are her words from our Archives. Toni Morrison’s speech “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature”
Your heart like a cathedral/covers us in this instant, like the/ sky/and your song, loud and magnificent, and your volcanic/ tenderness, /fills to the roof like a burning statue.
O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god/if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean
I’m writing this on Monday the 16th. I hear a motor outside; is it them? I write because I want these things to be known. If something should happen to me, it’s important that people know what happened and how.
When I look at Viking l’s panorama I have an eerie sense that this may be what the Earth looked like before the origin of life-an interesting, reworked, eroded, developed landscape, but one without the transmuting presence of biology.