Tannie’s Reviews > Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations > Status Update

“And this woman said to us, and her own daughter, that we had all been ‘tampered with’ because our skin was not Black like hers. She said the race has been ‘ tampered with.’ You are no longer pure.” Telling that to children is wild!

‘If you don’t understand your past, you can’t transcend it, you might repeat it, you don’t understand half of your life. Knowledge is what’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.’

Fav: ‘That subtle racist argument about how universal art works better than any other is fraudulent entirely. Anybody who sets out and writes a universal novel has written nothing.’ ‘ You see, there are more connections among us than differences, and that is the point.’

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to buy this book! Fav quotes:‘Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before.’ ‘But paradoxically, what happens is that the more specific one is, the more specificity there is in the writing, the more assessable it is.’

I haven’t read Biographies or Autobiographies before. So this is my first and it’s quite interesting—more than I expected it to be. There’s a book mentioned in it by Toni Morrison, who the interview is about—duh— called, The Bluest Eye that apparently I had already had it in my want to read books from like 2 years ago and now I’m looking forward to that.