Some quotations become so famous that they stop being read.

At first glance, this one sounds like something you might find on a café wall. Don’t let other people define you. A reassuring message. An encouraging one.

I don’t think Toni Morrison wasn’t writing greetings cards. Or motivational posters.

When she writes, ‘Definitions belong to the definers – not the defined,‘ she could be offering self-help advice. I prefer to think she’s exposing one of the oldest ways power works.

Who gets to decide what words like civilised, criminal, respectable, normal, or even human actually mean?

The people with the loudest voices? The widest audiences? The greatest authority? The biggest armies?

George Orwell explored the same idea in Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you control language, you don’t simply influence thought – you shape the world people believe they inhabit. Morrison asks a related question. Before we can even begin to understand ourselves, who has already decided what we are?

After nearly fifteen years of teaching English, I’ve become increasingly suspicious of definitions that appear too neat. Literature rarely asks us to accept labels. It challenges us to examine them.

In this context, Morrison’s sentence feels unsettling. It isn’t telling us to ignore other people’s opinions. It’s asking a much harder question.

Who wrote the label in the first place?

Join the conversation: I’d like to hear about texts which have changed the language you’ve used, or influenced your way of speaking.