Toni Morrison Quotes

She is dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us and her adult life turned out...

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We spea...

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. ...

It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the f...

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just rem...

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the...

Wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

I like marriage. The idea.

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work....

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a...

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to ...

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enorm...

There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich a...

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The...

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and e...

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but w...

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because yo...

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, yo...

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to clo...

Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I n...

I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even ...

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it...

It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of mone...

Passion is never enough neither is skill.

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to thi...

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you ...

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in., ...

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take ...

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, sai...

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like for...

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place with...

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a ...

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you do...

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, mi...

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun success...

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and ...

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contra...

All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are...

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, ...

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very ...

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not mo...

We tend to overlook goodness, but we must put goodness front and center in our lives.

Naturally all of them had a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale abo...

You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want...

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even...

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only abo...

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must ...

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks w...

Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And i...

I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who ha...

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] ...

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an in...

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who ea...

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has na...

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because ...

You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the mena...

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consola...

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and ...

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the oth...

She knew Paul D was adding something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to....

Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green...

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute...

I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more ...

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things...

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: dr...

Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.

More it hurt more better it is. Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling th...

And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not ...

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and...

Take off that coat,' he told him.'Sir?''You heard me.'The boy slipped out of his jacket, whining, 'W...

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the h...

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back ...

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that ...

Sethe, he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."He l...

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There...

Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. List...

What's fair ain't necessarily right.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigabl...

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under contro...

She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-stor...

Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you “fore you fall. Go as far inside a...