To the incomparable Ms. Morrison

Toni Morrison's eighty-fourth birthday was this past Wednesday, February 18th. She has been a prolific writer through much of her life, with books like The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Paradise, Beloved, among others. Her novels focus on issues of race and patriarchy as well as the inability to reconcile a painful past to what could be a hopeful present. Your library has some of Morrison's novels, calling out to you to come and read. Here's wishing Toni Morrison a happy birthday, and gratitude for enriching our literary landscape!  

An excerpt from her 1997 novel, Paradise: 

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like 

somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with  

somebody in order to get to someplace you want or you believe it has to do with  

how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you 

believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not  

maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. 

Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison  

or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal.  

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you 

think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive 

except that is is God (141).