Tracy K. Smith:

I feel like Morrison provides us as Americans with a vocabulary for acknowledging and grappling with the effects, the ongoing effects of slavery upon all of us, no matter who we are.

She reminds us that the lives of blacks who are often at the center of that story exist on a mythic scale that were central to what America is, what it believes itself to be, and what it might actively be pushing against as well.

It's a story that lives in history, but I think it takes art to bring those questions and those realities into an urgent kind of contact with who we are as people.

Morrison used to talk about, you know, crossing the mere air that sits between yourself and another person and how difficult that is sometimes. But it's the language of literature and art that helps us to do that. It pulls us out of ourselves and makes us beholden to other people who might be strangers to us.