Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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
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
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

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

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

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
Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Toni Morrison
Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers — and I need clarity, in order to write — and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever. I can feel melancholy, and I can feel full of regret, but anger is something that is useful to the people who watch it... it's not useful to me.

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

Toni Morrison
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Toni Morrison
Deep within the word 'American' is its association with race... American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term application to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

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
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. 'You your best thing, Sethe. You are.' His holding fingers are holding hers. 'Me? Me?

Toni Morrison
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

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

Toni Morrison
Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Toni Morrison
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Toni Morrison
Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

Toni Morrison
Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

Toni Morrison
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Toni Morrison