Life & Mortality Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison snaps mortality into focus with a blunt, almost bureaucratic certainty: "We die". No metaphors, no comfort. The sentence lands like a verdict, and then she pivots, refusing to let death have the last word. If dying is the meaning of life, it is meaning in the bleakest sense: the one fact no one outruns. But Morrison is less interested in existential drama than in what humans do with the time death puts a border around.

"But we do language" is the key turn. The verb choice matters. Language isn’t something we possess like property; it’s labor, craft, ritual, improvisation. Morrison treats language as action, not ornament - a thing you perform against erasure. In her work, words are never neutral; they carry history, violence, kinship, and the politics of who gets to name whom. Underneath this line is a moral claim: a life is not only counted in years or achievements, but in the care, precision, and daring with which you speak, tell, and listen.

"Measure" brings the argument down to earth. Not meaning (grand, philosophical, often abstract), but measure: a practical standard, a way to assess what mattered. For a Black woman novelist writing into and against an American tradition that routinely misnames and silences, this isn’t literary sentimentality. It’s a cultural doctrine. Death is inevitable; language is chosen. Your footprint is the story you leave, the people you make legible, and the lies you refuse to repeat.