I am all the things I have ever loved.

Toni Morrison wrote 11 novels during her lifetime and received a number of prestigious honors and accolades for her body of work, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize for literature. Centering her novels on the lived experiences of Black Americans, Morrison highlighted the realities of her characters’ lives through intimate explorations of identity, race, gender, and economic class. This compelling quote comes from Morrison’s preface in “The Black Book,” an encyclopedic exploration of the Black experience in America, edited by Morrison and published in 1974. Her words here are a profound reminder that we are each a compilation of everything we have ever known and loved, connected to our ancestors and our descendants by our experiences and memories.