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“… never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children”

“… he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s” To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.

“.. ALL OF A SUDDEN they run at each other once more and if you have a better phrase than like thundering elephants insert it here [ ].”

“… cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.” The Autograph Man: A Novel (Vintage International), Zadie Smith

“… In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418.” The White Album: Essays, Joan Didion

“The sacred is of us, of this network, of our wandering, our errantry.” Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.” The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom, Toni Morrison

Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language—inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture—can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the “calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science.” Daughters of Toni: A Remembrance, Zadie Smith, reprinted as the foreword of The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom.