Top 100 Toni Morrison Quotes
#1. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison
#2. They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
Toni Morrison
#3. I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Toni Morrison
#4. The desire, let alone the gesture,to meet her needs was good enough to loft her spirits to the place where she could take the next step: ask for some clarifying word; some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it.
Toni Morrison
#5. I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles
Toni Morrison
#6. I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
Toni Morrison
#7. It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated - hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.
Toni Morrison
#8. You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.
Toni Morrison
#9. From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.
Toni Morrison
#10. The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn't worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.
Toni Morrison
#11. In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
Toni Morrison
#12. Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
Toni Morrison
#13. Amy dragged her eyes over Sethe's face as though she would never give out so confidential a piece of information as that to a perfect stranger.
Toni Morrison
#14. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
Toni Morrison
#15. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like "Where do your ideas come from?" Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction.
Toni Morrison
#16. Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
#17. When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.
Toni Morrison
#18. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
Toni Morrison
#19. If there is somebody with bluer eyes than mine, then maybe there is somebody with the bluest eyes. The bluest eyes in the whole world.
Toni Morrison
#21. She missed
without knowing what she missed
paints and crayons
Toni Morrison
#22. A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
Toni Morrison
#23. A little bird'll be here with the morning." "Oh?" said the rose-petal lady. "Tomorrow morning?" "That's the only morning coming." "It can't be," the rose-petal lady said. "It's too soon." "No it ain't. Right on time.
Toni Morrison
#25. I don't want to be free of you because I am alive only with you.
Toni Morrison
#26. Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.
Toni Morrison
#27. It's not about choosing somebody over her. It's about making space for somebody along with her.
Toni Morrison
#29. When he visited his and Adam's old bedroom, the thread of disapproval he'd felt during his proposal of a memorial became a rope, as he saw the savage absence not only of Adam but of himself. So when he shut the door on his family and stepped out into the rain it was an already belated act.
Toni Morrison
#30. Her heart kicked and an itchy burning in her throat made her swallow all her saliva away. She didn't know which way to go.
Toni Morrison
#31. Wicked People Love Wickedly, Violent People Love Violently, Weak People Love Weakly, Stupid People Love Stupidly, But The Love Of A Free Man Is Never Safe ...
Toni Morrison
#32. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks
Toni Morrison
#33. From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves.
Toni Morrison
#34. Dear God ... I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after.
Toni Morrison
#35. My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
Toni Morrison
#36. One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
Toni Morrison
#37. To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
Toni Morrison
#38. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.
Toni Morrison
#39. My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Toni Morrison
#40. She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.
Toni Morrison
#41. I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?'
'I'm looking now.
Toni Morrison
#42. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
Toni Morrison
#43. I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
Toni Morrison
#44. And even later, when for the first time in her life she had lain in bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said it truly meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not his at all.
Toni Morrison
#45. For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
Toni Morrison
#46. What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?
Toni Morrison
#47. Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
Toni Morrison
#48. As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
Toni Morrison
#49. I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.
Toni Morrison
#51. I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
Toni Morrison
#54. In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
#55. Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.
Toni Morrison
#56. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
Toni Morrison
#57. You're in trouble,' she says, yawning. 'Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.
Toni Morrison
#58. populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day
Toni Morrison
#59. To get to a place where you could love anything you chose
not to need permission for desire
well now _that_ was freedom.
Toni Morrison
#60. Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget. She's got a big-time job in California but she don't call or visit anymore. She sends me money and stuff every now and then, but I ain't seen her in I don't know how long.
Toni Morrison
#61. No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
Toni Morrison
#62. He habitually contrasted the beaten, penniless, half-naked King of the Jews screaming betrayal on a cross with the bejeweled, glamorously dressed pope whispering homilies above the Vatican's vault.
Toni Morrison
#63. You revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison
#64. So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.
Toni Morrison
#65. What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
#66. You looking good."
"Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
Toni Morrison
#67. I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness
Toni Morrison
#68. Adults do not talk to us - they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information.
Toni Morrison
#70. Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.
Toni Morrison
#71. As long as your feet are under my table, you'll do in this house what you are told.
Toni Morrison
#72. She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact.
Toni Morrison
#74. There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
Toni Morrison
#75. She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.
Toni Morrison
#76. No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.
Toni Morrison
#77. They have the eyes of people who can tell what time it is by the colour of the sky ... their eyes do not bite
Toni Morrison
#78. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.
Toni Morrison
#79. Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
#80. The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.
Toni Morrison
#81. Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
Toni Morrison
#83. Don't nobody have to die if they don't want to. - Pilate
Toni Morrison
#84. Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing.
Toni Morrison
#85. Don't love her too much. Don't. Maybe it's still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children. I have to tell her. I have to protect her.
Toni Morrison
#86. I know what every colored woman in this country is doing ... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
Toni Morrison
#87. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.
Toni Morrison
#88. Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.
Toni Morrison
#89. His bed was where they slept and where the great thing people warned about or giggled about took place. It was not so much painful as dull. Cee thought it would get better later. Better turned out to be simply more, and while the quantity increased, its pleasure lay in its brevity.
Toni Morrison
#90. I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison
#91. She didn't say so, but it suddenly occurred to her that good sex was not knowledge. It was barely information.
Toni Morrison
#92. When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?
Toni Morrison
#93. Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Toni Morrison
#94. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison
#95. Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
Toni Morrison
#96. Correct what you can; learn from what you can't.
Toni Morrison
#97. We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.
Toni Morrison
#98. Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
Toni Morrison
#99. If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.
Toni Morrison
#100. ...and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late.
Toni Morrison
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