A Quote by Toni Morrison
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Related Quotes
The road to wisdom is paved with excess. The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.
Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange.
The test, surely, of a creed is not the ability of those who accept it to announce their faith; its test is its ability to change their behavior in the ordinary round of daily life. Judged by that test, I know no religion that has a moral claim upon the allegiance of men.
Power, as human beings exercise power, to me means the ability to change: the ability to change oneself, the ability to change one's community. And the positive use of power is transformation of self and community toward a higher ideal, toward a healed world.
This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.
The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places.
Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter of prayer; but a capacity for faith, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one's self in God's glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God.
That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
I emphasize self-esteem, self-confidence, and dignity, not as an ideal, but as a real test of community organization. Without leadership development, community organizations do not have staying power.
It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.
We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence.
We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
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