Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

Toni Morrison
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

Toni Morrison
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 they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician.

Toni Morrison
It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

Toni Morrison
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

Toni Morrison
When sorrow is deep,
The secret soul keeps
Its weapon of choice:
The love of all loves.

Toni Morrison
Only unharnessed hearts
Can survive a locked-down life.

Toni Morrison
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Toni Morrison
You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know.

Toni Morrison
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own.

Toni Morrison
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.

Toni Morrison
The City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

Toni Morrison
She needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.

Toni Morrison
More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?

Toni Morrison
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever...

Toni Morrison
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to:
Would you save my life? or would you take it?

Toni Morrison
Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

Toni Morrison
I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Toni Morrison
Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

Toni Morrison
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Toni Morrison
Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

Toni Morrison
I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

Toni Morrison
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
It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

Toni Morrison
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

Toni Morrison
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

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

Toni Morrison
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

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

Toni Morrison
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?.

Toni Morrison