"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
This is one of Morrison's most quoted lines. It echoes with a certain resonance now, after her death in August 2019. This is one of the main ideas of her Nobel Lecture: that language is essential for the vitality of human life. As the old woman thinks about how to respond to the children, she knows how important language is, and chooses her words carefully.
"We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, 'nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced.' Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?"
This quote shows the tension between generations that motivates the children. They are angry at the old woman for being reticent to share her stories. Their anger reveals the power of narrative: they view it as a vital ingredient to address the problems they will face in years to come. Without the knowledge and stories of generations past, they cannot enact a vision for the future.
"Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created."
This quote summarizes one of the main arguments of Morrison's Nobel Lecture: that storytelling is is generative, revealing, and powerful.
“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company."
The children in the fable are different in many ways from the old woman. They have their sight; she does not. They are presumably white and male; she is a black woman. They live in the city; she is isolated even by rural standards. Yet in this quote, they tell her that they want to learn from those differences. Indeed, the very fact of their difference mean that they have something to teach each other. This, too, is an important lesson from Morrison's Lecture: diversity adds value and richness to our lives, if we take the time to learn from experiences different to ours.
"Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge."
In this quote, Morrison is remarkably prescient in her analysis of the power of language to distort reality. In today's news cycles and social media realm, language does not only describe society, but it shapes it, too. This is what the old woman in the fable calls "dead" language—language designed to limit and extort.
