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The Dancing Mind
On the occasion of her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the sixth of November, 1996, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison speaks with brevity and passion to the pleasures, the difficulties, the necessities, of the reading/writing life in our time. "From the Hardcover edition."
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First published December 24, 1996
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About the author
Toni Morrison
234 books23.4k followersChloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
May 9, 2024
“It is more than an urge to to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters” (Morrison 14).
What a thrilling essay this is!
It’s Morrison reflecting on the importance of stillness and solitude, of how writing and reading requires imagination and concentration. She prefaces the central message of “The Dancing Mind” by providing two anecdotes from individuals she met who has two opposing experiences.
One is an individual who came from a privileged background who was programmed to succeed without imagination, and the art of solitude in writing was a difficult thing for them to practice and adapt because they were never encouraged to imagine for themselves, “the reader disabled by an absence of solitude” (15). The other anecdote is from someone who lives in a constant state of chaos and violence that there is no time at all for imagination, let alone concentration on reading, which is a very privileged thing to do- to gain the skill and nuances of a text, “the writer imperiled by the absence of a hospitable community” (15).
But with trademark empathy, and avoiding (probably purposely) identity politics and race, and acknowledging these two types of issues that can get in the way of creating art, Morrison gives an impassioned speech that asks everyone, all of us, to allow for this kind of world building and space.
What a thrilling essay this is!
It’s Morrison reflecting on the importance of stillness and solitude, of how writing and reading requires imagination and concentration. She prefaces the central message of “The Dancing Mind” by providing two anecdotes from individuals she met who has two opposing experiences.
One is an individual who came from a privileged background who was programmed to succeed without imagination, and the art of solitude in writing was a difficult thing for them to practice and adapt because they were never encouraged to imagine for themselves, “the reader disabled by an absence of solitude” (15). The other anecdote is from someone who lives in a constant state of chaos and violence that there is no time at all for imagination, let alone concentration on reading, which is a very privileged thing to do- to gain the skill and nuances of a text, “the writer imperiled by the absence of a hospitable community” (15).
But with trademark empathy, and avoiding (probably purposely) identity politics and race, and acknowledging these two types of issues that can get in the way of creating art, Morrison gives an impassioned speech that asks everyone, all of us, to allow for this kind of world building and space.
July 27, 2007
the fact that the first african-american to win the nobel prize for literature is reading this amzazing work on the pleasures of intellectual stimulation and growth through reading is really the only qualification it needs to command the highest recommendations. nevertheless, by moving beyond the sense of awe that toni morrison tends to inspire just by being toni morrison, one is able to delve into the wonders of her own dancing mind as revealed in this thrilling audio book.[return:][return:]aberjhani[return:]author of "encyclopedia of the harlem renaissance"[return:]"the wisdom of w.e.b. du bois"[return:]and "visions of a skylark dressed in black"
January 23, 2022
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. The peril it faces comes not from the computers and information highways that raise alarm among book readers, but from unrecognized, more sinister quarters.
I want to tell two little stories — anecdotes really — that circle each other in my mind. They are disparate, unrelated anecdotes with more to distinguish each one from the other than similarities, but they are connected for me in a way that I hope to make clear.
The first I heard third-or fourth-hand, and although I can’t vouch for its accuracy, I do have personal knowledge of situations exactly like it. A student at a very very prestigious university said that it was in graduate school while working on his Ph.D. that he had to teach himself a skill he had never learned. He had grown up in an affluent community with very concerned and caring parents. He said that his whole life had been filled with carefully selected activities: educational, cultural, athletic. Every waking hour was filled with events to enhance his life. Can you see him? Captain of his team. Member of the Theatre Club. A Latin Prize winner. Going on vacations designed for pleasure and meaningfulness; on fascinating and educational trips and tours; attending excellent camps along with equally highly motivated peers. He gets the best grades, is a permanent fixture on the honor roll, gets into several of the best universities, graduates, goes on to get a master’s degree, and now is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at this first-rate university. And it is there that (at last, but fortunately) he discovers his disability: in all those years he had never learned to sit in a room by himself and read for four hours and have those four hours followed by another four without any companionship but his own mind. He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, but he taught himself, forced himself to be alone with a book he was not assigned to read, a book on which there was no test. He forced himself to be alone without the comfort or disturbance of telephone, radio, television. To his credit, he learned this habit, this skill, that once was part of any literate young person’s life.
The second story involves a firsthand experience. I was in Strasbourg attending a meeting of a group called the Parliament of Writers. It is an organization of writers committed to the aggressive rescue of persecuted writers. After one of the symposia, just outside the doors of the hall, a woman approached me and asked if I knew anything about the contemporary literature of her country. I said no; I knew nothing of it. We talked a few minutes more. Earlier, while listening to her speak on a panel, I had been awestruck by her articulateness, the ease with which she moved among languages and literatures, her familiarity with histories of nations, histories of criticisms, histories of authors. She knew my work; I knew nothing of hers. We continued to talk, animatedly, and then, in the middle of it, she began to cry. No sobs, no heaving shoulders, just great tears rolling down her face. She did not wipe them away and she did not loosen her gaze. “You have to help us,” she said. “You have to help us. They are shooting us down in the street.” By “us” she meant women who wrote against the grain. “What can I do?” I asked her. She said, “I don’t know, but you have to try. There isn’t anybody else.”
Both of those stories are comments on the contemporary reading/writing life. In one, a comfortable, young American, a “successfully” educated male, alien in his own company, stunned and hampered by the inadequacy of his fine education, resorts to autodidactic strategies to move outside the surfeit and bounty and excess and (I think) the terror of growing up vacuum-pressured in this country and to learn a very old-fashioned skill. In the other, a splendidly educated woman living in a suffocating regime writes in fear that death may very well be the consequence of doing what I do: as a woman to write and publish unpoliced narrative. The danger of both environments is striking. First, the danger to reading that our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven culture poses even to the entitled; second, the physical danger to writing suffered by persons with enviable educations who live in countries where the practice of modern art is illegal and subject to official vigilantism and murder.
I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic claims made on behalf of writing and writers. Writing never made me happy. Writing never made me suffer. I have had misfortunes small and large, yet all through them nothing could keep me from doing it. And nothing could satiate my appetite for others who did. What is so important about this craft that it dominates me and my colleagues? A craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. A craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. It is more than an urge to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters. It is more than a desire to watch other writers manage to refigure the world. I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s—which is reading: what the graduate student taught himself. That I need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain—which is writing: what the woman writer fought a whole government to do.
The reader disabled by an absence of solitude; the writer imperiled by the absence of a hospitable community. Both stories fuse and underscore for me the seriousness of the industry whose sole purpose is the publication of writers for readers. It is a business, of course, in which there is feasting, and even some coin; there is drama and high, high spirits. There is celebration and anguish, there are flukes and errors in judgment; there is brilliance and unbridled ego. But that is the costume. Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth, pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world is quite serious. Its real life is about crating and producing and distributing knowledge; about making it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one’s own mind dancing with another’s; about making sure that the environment in which this work is done is welcoming, supportive. It is making sure that no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency can interfere with what gets written or published. That no conglomerate or political wing uses its force to still inquiry or to reaffirm rule.
Securing that kind of peace—the peace of the dancing mind—is our work, and, as the woman in Strasbourg said, “There isn’t anybody else.”
I want to tell two little stories — anecdotes really — that circle each other in my mind. They are disparate, unrelated anecdotes with more to distinguish each one from the other than similarities, but they are connected for me in a way that I hope to make clear.
The first I heard third-or fourth-hand, and although I can’t vouch for its accuracy, I do have personal knowledge of situations exactly like it. A student at a very very prestigious university said that it was in graduate school while working on his Ph.D. that he had to teach himself a skill he had never learned. He had grown up in an affluent community with very concerned and caring parents. He said that his whole life had been filled with carefully selected activities: educational, cultural, athletic. Every waking hour was filled with events to enhance his life. Can you see him? Captain of his team. Member of the Theatre Club. A Latin Prize winner. Going on vacations designed for pleasure and meaningfulness; on fascinating and educational trips and tours; attending excellent camps along with equally highly motivated peers. He gets the best grades, is a permanent fixture on the honor roll, gets into several of the best universities, graduates, goes on to get a master’s degree, and now is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at this first-rate university. And it is there that (at last, but fortunately) he discovers his disability: in all those years he had never learned to sit in a room by himself and read for four hours and have those four hours followed by another four without any companionship but his own mind. He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, but he taught himself, forced himself to be alone with a book he was not assigned to read, a book on which there was no test. He forced himself to be alone without the comfort or disturbance of telephone, radio, television. To his credit, he learned this habit, this skill, that once was part of any literate young person’s life.
The second story involves a firsthand experience. I was in Strasbourg attending a meeting of a group called the Parliament of Writers. It is an organization of writers committed to the aggressive rescue of persecuted writers. After one of the symposia, just outside the doors of the hall, a woman approached me and asked if I knew anything about the contemporary literature of her country. I said no; I knew nothing of it. We talked a few minutes more. Earlier, while listening to her speak on a panel, I had been awestruck by her articulateness, the ease with which she moved among languages and literatures, her familiarity with histories of nations, histories of criticisms, histories of authors. She knew my work; I knew nothing of hers. We continued to talk, animatedly, and then, in the middle of it, she began to cry. No sobs, no heaving shoulders, just great tears rolling down her face. She did not wipe them away and she did not loosen her gaze. “You have to help us,” she said. “You have to help us. They are shooting us down in the street.” By “us” she meant women who wrote against the grain. “What can I do?” I asked her. She said, “I don’t know, but you have to try. There isn’t anybody else.”
Both of those stories are comments on the contemporary reading/writing life. In one, a comfortable, young American, a “successfully” educated male, alien in his own company, stunned and hampered by the inadequacy of his fine education, resorts to autodidactic strategies to move outside the surfeit and bounty and excess and (I think) the terror of growing up vacuum-pressured in this country and to learn a very old-fashioned skill. In the other, a splendidly educated woman living in a suffocating regime writes in fear that death may very well be the consequence of doing what I do: as a woman to write and publish unpoliced narrative. The danger of both environments is striking. First, the danger to reading that our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven culture poses even to the entitled; second, the physical danger to writing suffered by persons with enviable educations who live in countries where the practice of modern art is illegal and subject to official vigilantism and murder.
I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic claims made on behalf of writing and writers. Writing never made me happy. Writing never made me suffer. I have had misfortunes small and large, yet all through them nothing could keep me from doing it. And nothing could satiate my appetite for others who did. What is so important about this craft that it dominates me and my colleagues? A craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. A craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. It is more than an urge to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters. It is more than a desire to watch other writers manage to refigure the world. I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s—which is reading: what the graduate student taught himself. That I need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain—which is writing: what the woman writer fought a whole government to do.
The reader disabled by an absence of solitude; the writer imperiled by the absence of a hospitable community. Both stories fuse and underscore for me the seriousness of the industry whose sole purpose is the publication of writers for readers. It is a business, of course, in which there is feasting, and even some coin; there is drama and high, high spirits. There is celebration and anguish, there are flukes and errors in judgment; there is brilliance and unbridled ego. But that is the costume. Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth, pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world is quite serious. Its real life is about crating and producing and distributing knowledge; about making it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one’s own mind dancing with another’s; about making sure that the environment in which this work is done is welcoming, supportive. It is making sure that no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency can interfere with what gets written or published. That no conglomerate or political wing uses its force to still inquiry or to reaffirm rule.
Securing that kind of peace—the peace of the dancing mind—is our work, and, as the woman in Strasbourg said, “There isn’t anybody else.”
August 10, 2016
"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."
Read the whole speech here:
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaaccept...
Read the whole speech here:
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaaccept...
January 1, 2023
“what is so important about this craft that it dominates me and my colleagues? a craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. a craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. it is more than an urge to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters. it is more than a desire to watch other writers manage to refigure the world. i know now, more than i ever did (and i always on some level knew it), that i need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s—which is reading: what the graduate student taught himself. that i need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain—which is writing: what the woman writer fought a whole government to do.”
July 5, 2023
Beautiful. Short, but powerful. Inspired by the concept that the act of writing appears solitary but needs another for its completion, loved her description of the danger that “our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven culture” poses to reading, and was moved by the plight faced by writers in dangerous places.
April 29, 2017
It's unfair to call this a "book" - it's a transcribed acceptance speech - but it's also Toni Morrison, which means it's beautiful and powerful and important.
June 3, 2024
You know you really love an author when you: (1) purposely seek out her Nobel laureate speech and (2) subsequently rate said speech a 5 star read.
October 11, 2025
❝I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic claims made on behalf of writing and writers. Writing never made me happy. Writing never made me suffer. I have had misfortunes small and large, yet all through them nothing could keep me from doing it. And nothing could satiate my appetite for others who did. What is so important about this craft that it dominates me and my colleagues? A craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. A craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. It is more than an urge to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters. It is more than a desire to watch other writers manage to refigure the world. I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s—which is reading: what the graduate student taught himself. That I need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain—which is writing: what the woman writer fought a whole government to do.❞
November 13, 2023
I am happy to be a veracious reader and Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors. I am also a writer and reading The Dancing Mind, confirmed for me the necessity of both these skills. Added to these are the importance of having someone to share what we have read and written in an environment where we are both safe and free to do so.
April 16, 2018
I realize as I began reading, that I’ve read these words before. No matter, though. I’m sure they found me at precisely the right time they were supposed to. Whenever I need inspiration, I turn to Ms. Toni, and this time did not disappoint.
December 13, 2018
A great speech, highlighting the importance of the worlds of reading and writing and how they interact. In a short span of time, this speech made me rethink how I conceptualize my work as an English PhD student and writer.
February 24, 2022
Always like seeing the effort put into binding into hardcopy things like speeches and other ephemera. I appreciate that someone believed that Toni Morrison's acceptance speech was worth commemorating for posterity, because, of course, it was.
February 23, 2020
Tiny little speech by Morrison on the responsibility of writers to their audience and self.
April 30, 2020
A beautiful piece of work. I want to write like her one day.
May 16, 2020
Beautifully written
July 27, 2020
Inspirational!
December 8, 2020
The one and only, Toni Morrison. The star of my night sky. “There isn’t anybody else.”
February 10, 2021
Beautiful. Relevant.
August 29, 2021
Powerful and poetic! Thats Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate writing powerfully but very poetically about black woman identity in America. 5/5 Shortest must read.
January 7, 2022
toni morrison always knows how to set my mind straight in my effort to write, its meaning and importance. i hope all my practice comes to fruition with her guidance. 5/5 stars
February 28, 2022
Just a few words
What a awakening! This small writing is not subtle or indifferent. It addresses how vital it is to be free to write and to think.
What a awakening! This small writing is not subtle or indifferent. It addresses how vital it is to be free to write and to think.
January 1, 2025
I’m in agreement with Morrison, the relationship with reading and writing is as intimate as it codependent. Their relationship — that of book and pen — is a world-class, vehement love story.
February 19, 2025
Less than 20 pages simple and short
Read
July 23, 2025姐在自己作品后面解释作品的寥寥数笔都让我爱不释手，这样的演讲稿怎么可能写不好呢？我真是… 让我再找找姐别的散文杂文！
December 19, 2018
Toni Morrison just reminded me that an author writes a book and that a reader makes said book his or hers or izzes own. That it is the dancing of two minds, the author's and my own, and that from this interaction knowledge is imparted, but unique to each reader's perspective. Reading a book more than once, is never the same experience. You walk away each time with a different understanding. Toni Morrison's words are like the golden nuggets I wish I could find in my own free, creative writing. Lol. Hahaha. So when I'm tired of sifting through the coal I regurgitate for ten minutes or staring at the page with zilch, it is nice to be able to open this book and sift through the golden outpouring of Morrison's love for her craft and that of other writers. I always walk away satiated with new insights from this book. And her words, in this book, are like glistening jewels to me. I always wonder how books shape writers. How many books must one devour to be able to drip at least one golden nugget unto the page. I'm okay with pushing coal. Lol. It is the urge to write and spend time with my own mind that I do it anyway. But I prefer reading to that. And this one of those rare jewels that I keep on a special shelf because reading not brings joy. Love this book.
November 6, 2016
In this speech published in a slender book form, Morrison examines how the peace gained from the reading/writing world is in peril. She describes our world as a “busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven culture” that inherently threatens the mind’s natural ability to engage in precious, self-fulfilling solitude. In many restrictive countries around the world, Morrison also explains, that under equal peril is the liberty to create and share “unpoliced narrative.” She provides an anecdote of a woman living under a suppressive and murderous regime, which has placed clamps on creative minds in efforts to halt the exchange of knowledge. For Morrison, an open mind is one that “dances” with another through the process of reading. And we, as citizens of the world, must secure and practice “the peace of the dancing mind” or else we will be left with a world stripped of natural freedom. As she does so splendidly with the prose in her novels , Morrison’s command of ideas and language to deliver a powerful message is evident in this short speech.
June 6, 2016
In the mid 90s, Toni Morrison was one of those authors whose every written word was taken as publishable material, meaning that books like this (a mere 17 pages in length--it is a speech, after all) were hastily published in order to capitalize on Morrison's fame.
Although I am cynical towards this sort of marketing, Morrison's lecture is, of course, moving. As Morrison sees it, the weight of social change rests largely with writers, which is an admirable and compelling thought.
Although I am cynical towards this sort of marketing, Morrison's lecture is, of course, moving. As Morrison sees it, the weight of social change rests largely with writers, which is an admirable and compelling thought.
February 21, 2025
"I want to tell two little stories– anecdotes really–that circle each other in my mind. They are disparate, unrelated anecdotes with more to distinguish each one from the other than similarities, but they are connected for me in a way that I hope to make clear."
For readers, for writers, for educators, for students.
Read her speech here.
For readers, for writers, for educators, for students.
Read her speech here.
Read
April 16, 2011Brilliant. Small but huge meditation on the writer and conscience. Seventeen pages of enlightenment. Toni Morrison's speech upon acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,1996.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews