Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison dies aged 88

06/08/2019 - 16:57:00 

By Press Association.

Updated by Claude B.Djaquis

Ivory Coast Tribune.

Her publisher Alfred A Knopf said Morrison died on Monday night at Montefiore Medical Centre in New York.

She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, awarded in 1993.

The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her “visionary force.”

Her novel Beloved, in which a mother makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

Toni Morrison/Quotes:

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

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.

Toni, you have been an inspiration to us all blacks, who strive to thread to the limit of the sky.
One Ivorian poet, Seydou Koné (Alpha Blondy) once wondered: "Why should all black heroes die so soon".

May the mystic nights guide you in your transition. You will be sorely missed.

 

- I.T