Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Interpretation
Hospitality requires a balance between being welcoming and maintaining boundaries.
This quote by Toni Morrison highlights the duality of hospitality in a complex environment. It emphasizes the importance of being both generous and discerning, knowing when to embrace opportunities that arise and when to protect oneself from potential negative influences. It suggests that without this wisdom, one risks losing control either by overextending oneself or being dominated by external circumstances.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a discussion on maintaining healthy relationships can provide insight into balancing openness and boundaries.
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.
There are some needs only you can see. There are some hands only you can hold. There are some people only you can reach.
Sometimes the greatest deterrent to a great marriage is believing you have a perfect marriage.
Here's what I've learned about deal-breakers. If you have enough natural chemistry with someone, you overlook every single thing that you said would break the deal.
She is the mother I never had, she is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don't know a better person.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
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