Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

Toni Morrison
Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

Toni Morrison
They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly

Toni Morrison
Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed.

Toni Morrison
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
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Toni Morrison
I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.

Toni Morrison
Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.

Toni Morrison
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

Toni Morrison
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Toni Morrison
It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too. I thought if I removed the word from nearly every other place in the manuscript, it could become an earned word. If I could give the word, in my very modest way, its girth and its meaning and its terrible price and its clarity at the moment when that is all there is time for, then the title does work for me.

Toni Morrison
Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Toni Morrison
Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plough it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—Can you hear me? Pass it on!

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

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

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

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

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
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
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

Toni Morrison
My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

Toni Morrison
Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

Toni Morrison
I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

Toni Morrison
What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal—for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.

Toni Morrison
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

Toni Morrison