Toni Morrison on the Power of Art and the Writer’s Singular Service to Humanity

“Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last.”

“Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted,” Rebecca West — one of humanity’s most insightful and underappreciated writers — observed as she contemplated storytelling and survival in her 1941 masterwork Black...