Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Toni Morrison
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 are now taking that power away from them.

Toni Morrison
I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running — from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.

Toni Morrison
A habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

Toni Morrison
They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.

Toni Morrison
Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.

Toni Morrison
Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.

Toni Morrison
Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

Toni Morrison
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

Toni Morrison
At no point in my life have I ever felt as though I were an American.

Toni Morrison
A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

Toni Morrison
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
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Toni Morrison
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Toni Morrison
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

Toni Morrison
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

Toni Morrison
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Toni Morrison
When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

Toni Morrison
The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did.

Toni Morrison
When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better.

Toni Morrison
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.

Toni Morrison
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Toni Morrison
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
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

Toni Morrison
When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

Toni Morrison
Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside.

Toni Morrison
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Toni Morrison
I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman.

Toni Morrison
They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...

Toni Morrison
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Toni Morrison