Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

The clouds gathered together, stood still and watched the river scuttle around the forest floor, crash headlong into haunches of hills with no notion of where it was going, until exhausted, ill and grieving, it slowed to a stop just twenty leagues short of the sea.

Toni Morrison
The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there — you who never was there — if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over — over and done with — it's going to always be there waiting for you.

Toni Morrison
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

Toni Morrison
It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

Toni Morrison
A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

Toni Morrison
As is the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.

Toni Morrison
Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment.

Toni Morrison
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Toni Morrison
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

Toni Morrison
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
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Toni Morrison
I believe that one of the principle ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: "Once upon a time."

Toni Morrison
Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

Toni Morrison
Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Toni Morrison
I was thrilled that my mother is still alive and can share this with me. And I can claim representation in so many areas. I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

Toni Morrison
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.

Toni Morrison
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
Everything depends on knowing how much, she said, and Good is knowing when to stop.

Toni Morrison
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."

Toni Morrison
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Toni Morrison
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
How come it can't fly no better than a chicken?' Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.' The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.

Toni Morrison
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.

Toni Morrison
Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

Toni Morrison
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

Toni Morrison
I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around our neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face.

Toni Morrison
I wish I'd a known more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a known more, I woulda loved more.

Toni Morrison
The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

Toni Morrison
They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

Toni Morrison
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

Toni Morrison