"Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
~ Toni Morrison ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
More Toni Morrison quotes
"That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who yo...
"The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, you...
"What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined ...
"Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
"I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there wa...
"Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the m...
"I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but th...
"Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schoo...
"All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschy...
"It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shame...
"Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
"Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping sna...
"Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blu...
"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and ...