Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel, “Beloved.”

In her beautiful Nobel acceptance speech Morrison stressed that language is “an act with consequences,” something the powerful often forget. “Oppressive language does more than represent violence,” she wrote. “It is violence.”

She continued, using the voice of youngsters speaking to an old woman:

“For our sakes and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light … Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”