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“When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.'
'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.��



I found Toni Morrison to be one of the most consistent authors I ever read. And, with her being one of my favourite writers of all time, this means I found all her books I read to this day extremely interesting and deeply touching. Not only she was consistent with her style, but also with her themes, characters, and general tone of her stories. Toni spoke about women, power, life, the absurdity and inevitability of human weakness. There are few other authors who can make me feel such deep emotions and connect so authentically with characters who live a completely different life than my own. She never fails to make me shed a tear.

This book was no exception: short, raw, unapologetic; the story of the community of "The Bottom" refuses to sugarcoat the roughness of black people's lives in the 1920s-40s, and it's filled with pain, guilt, regret, timeless women's wisdom and the sheer horror of the human condition. In a world where happiness seems to be a forgotten concept - only good for children and people who don't know better - women and men thrive and, against all odds, they love, laugh, cry, and survive. There are moments, in this book - especially the very ending - which struck me with the depth of their truth. I truly believe Toni had one of the deepest insights on the real meaning of life in history. It's not rare at all, for me, to read one of her books and have to stop and think about how she just gave an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of reality. Take, for example, this description of the loneliness of a single woman and the loneliness of a married, unhappy one:

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.��

And this desperate, incredibly touching declaration of love of an abandoned woman:

“But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?��

Or this description of the horror of routine:

“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.��

These words come from characters who would be described as "uneducated", but who share the timeless wisdom of humankind; that kind of knowledge who seems to be inherited from mothers to daughters, fathers to sons, like it's written in our genes. This is what makes good poetry. And this is why I love Toni: because there is no one, in the whole world; man or woman, child or adult, black or white, who would not understand her words with their own heart.

R.I.P.