A Book of Toni Morrison Quotations Is Coming This December

A book of quotations from the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is coming out in December.

With a foreword by Zadie Smith, the 128-page compilation was put together by Erroll McDonald, executive editor and vice president of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, the AP reports. The book will draw from Morrison’s entire body of work, including celebrated texts Beloved and Song of Solomon, and is titled The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom—a reference to one of her most famous sayings: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

A publisher’s note describes the book as a distillation of her major themes, including “transcendence through imagination; the self and its discontents; the vicissitudes of love; the whirligig of memory; the singular power of women; the original American sin of slavery; the bankruptcy of racial oppression; the complex humanity; and art of black people.”

You can preorder The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom here and revisit Paste’s piece on the best quotes from Beloved here.