...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the importance of external realities in affirming one's existence and sanity.
In this quote, Toni Morrison explores the relationship between an individual's sense of self and their external environment. The character views a stable object, akin to a lighthouse, as a vital connection to reality, serving to confirm her existence and prevent her from losing touch with the world. It highlights the need for tangible indicators of life and existence, emphasizing how our perceptions of reality can sometimes blur, especially in moments of introspection or existential uncertainty.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, one might say, 'As Toni Morrison reminds us, we need our lighthouses to affirm that we are alive in this world.'
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.
I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.
The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.
Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.
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