Top 100 Quotes About Toni Morrison
#1. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#2. Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
John Updike
#3. I eat kung pao chicken like it's going out of style, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an Asian cell in my body. I love Toni Morrison novels although I'm not black. I'm straight and I'm happily married. The reason I work here is because I think you deserve that, too.
Jodi Picoult
#4. When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
Junot Diaz
#5. Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
Donald Miller
#6. Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.
John Green
#7. When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.
Fran Lebowitz
#8. If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
#9. By striving so mightily to accomplish specific goals on behalf of one segment of humanity, she [Toni Morrison] went beyond them to create literary wonders capable of enriching the lives of not just her own people, but of all people.
Aberjhani
#10. I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
#11. I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Toni Morrison
#12. I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.
Marlon James
#13. I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#14. The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#15. I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.
Hillary Clinton
#16. I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.
Kola Boof
#17. Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.
Barack Obama
#18. The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.
Cornel West
#19. Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.
Judith Krug
#20. If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison
Sean Liburd
#21. There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race
scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct ... it has a social function, racism.
Toni Morrison
#22. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison
#23. She was usually idling by the river bank, or gathering berries in a field when a someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes, who - with no exchange of words - understood;
Toni Morrison
#24. I don't do the things other people call "play."
Toni Morrison
#25. 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
#26. My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that?Eight children and that's all I remember.
Toni Morrison
#27. It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.
Toni Morrison
#28. Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own.
Toni Morrison
#29. 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
#32. The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
#33. Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.
Toni Morrison
#34. Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice - to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.
Toni Morrison
#35. I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
Toni Morrison
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
Toni Morrison
#39. 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
#42. One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
Toni Morrison
#43. Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying.
Toni Morrison
#44. Is senses blunted by a permanent awareness of loss
Toni Morrison
#45. Social conversation was impossible for her because she could not lie.
Toni Morrison
#46. At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
Toni Morrison
#47. It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights - if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.
Toni Morrison
#48. 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
#49. The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Toni Morrison
#50. You want a real thing?" asked Alice. "I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.
Toni Morrison
#51. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
#52. Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Toni Morrison
#55. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.
Toni Morrison
#56. 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
#57. No, and if it's not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it's nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That's all there is.
Toni Morrison
#58. ... he didn't needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.
Toni Morrison
#60. In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni Morrison
#61. Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison
#62. It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end.
Toni Morrison
#63. 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
#64. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
Toni Morrison
#65. Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
Toni Morrison
#66. The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
Toni Morrison
#67. Gimme hate, Lord," he whimpered. "I'll take hate any day. But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it ... It's too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain't it heavy? Jesus? Ain't love heavy?
Toni Morrison
#68. 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
#69. In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
Toni Morrison
#70. Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.
Toni Morrison
#71. Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
Toni Morrison
#72. Marriages performed within,' read the sign next to the coffeehouse door, underneath in small letters a verse that combined warning with a sales pitch: 'When lawless lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin.
Toni Morrison
#73. 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
#74. Well, if a man don't HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance!
Toni Morrison
#76. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.
Toni Morrison
#77. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.
Toni Morrison
#78. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible.
Toni Morrison
#79. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you.'
'I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
Toni Morrison
#80. 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
#81. Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet.
"So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees.
Toni Morrison
#82. Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees - he leaped. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the wind, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
#83. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
Toni Morrison
#85. Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
Toni Morrison
#86. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
Toni Morrison
#87. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Toni Morrison
#88. Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way.
Toni Morrison
#89. Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below.
Toni Morrison
#90. I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.
Toni Morrison
#91. You couldn't learn age, but adulthood was there for all.
Toni Morrison
#92. Schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.
Toni Morrison
#93. When the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier
that only birds and planes could fly
he lost all interest in himself.
Toni Morrison
#94. Seeing her step so easily from the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.
Toni Morrison
#95. 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
#96. You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.
Toni Morrison
#97. When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else's child, do your eyes light up? That's what they're looking for.
Toni Morrison
#98. A woman could be cobra-thin and starving, but if she had grapefruit boobs and raccoon eyes, she was deliriously happy.
Toni Morrison
#99. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.
Toni Morrison
#100. The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.
Toni Morrison
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