Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Interpretation
Language helps us navigate and understand the world by giving names to things that might otherwise seem frightening.
In this quote, Toni Morrison emphasizes the power of language as a protective barrier against the unknown and the unsettling aspects of life. By naming things, language allows us to confront our fears and engages us in a process of reflection and contemplation, likening it to meditation that helps calm the mind and provide clarity.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature, this quote can be used to illustrate how storytelling helps us confront our fears.
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
The mind spends most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or unpleasant experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear. While lost in such cravings or aversions, we are unaware of what is happening now, what we are doing now.
He who is only just is cruel; who Upon the earth would live were all judged justly?
In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms
Consider your possessions loaned to you by God.
I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
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