Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture

I read Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in prison as part of  one of the writing classes. It was the second Nobel Lecture I had remember reading (Or third, as I may have read Steinbeck's decades ago.)  We read it for the issues of racism in language, and for that I suggest you read it all. Her lecture is in the form of a parable. What she says about writing, its purposes, cannot really be cut away from the larger issues of racism raised by the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Which is pretty much what I am doing with these quotes:

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.