A Quote by Barack Obama

Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.
I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.
'Beloved' by Toni Morrison. I think I read it first in college and have read it every few years since. The language itself is remarkable. I don't know that I've read a book that explains America so well.
I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.
Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.
I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
I am very bad at remembering the books I've read and so recently I had a wonderful experience. I decided I wanted to teach Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I hadn't read it in twenty-five years. I was surprised to find how much I drew from that book. Stole from that book, learned from that book about writing. I had forgotten and there it was. Morrison has called that text faulted. I cannot see how.
The power of material things, to bestow happiness, to bring joy into the life is tremendously exaggerated. But The right mental attitude for example gratitude that things are not worse, the trained mind the right habits of thought - lifeskills, will bring to us the best there is in the universe.
I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.
I can still remember the first time I heard a Beatles song. It was the fall of 1964, my second year in an American school after my family moved back from overseas, and I was standing on the corner of 64th street and First Avenue with my friend Larry Campbell.
All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.
I was raised in a musical house. Marvin Gaye. Boyz II Men. Jodeci. My mom always played that Toni Braxton song, 'Un-Break My Heart.' When I hear that song, it still puts me right back in the car with her.
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
I had a full college experience. I kind of learned how to be a good student at Bard. I had never really cared about academics, but in college I learned the power of - I don't want to say the power of knowledge, but the power of curiosity.
I remember when I first came out on tour, it was Greg Norman and Nick Price. We forget how big Norman was, what a presence he was. I remember one of my first tournaments, Greg threw an orange peel down on the ground and some fan ran over and grabbed it. 'This is Greg Norman's orange peel!'
As I got older I learned how to control my temper a little more. Boxing helped me a lot and most definitely when I had my first child it helped me tremendously.
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