Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Interpretation
Language helps us navigate and understand the world by giving names to things that might otherwise seem frightening.
In this quote, Toni Morrison emphasizes the power of language as a protective barrier against the unknown and the unsettling aspects of life. By naming things, language allows us to confront our fears and engages us in a process of reflection and contemplation, likening it to meditation that helps calm the mind and provide clarity.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature, this quote can be used to illustrate how storytelling helps us confront our fears.
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.
If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.
The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.
It's so kind of you to want to visit me in my loneliness. - The Wicked Witch of the West. Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking. - The Tin Woodsman Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
Foreign Assistance is not an end in itself. The purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it's no longer need.
Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience.
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