Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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

Toni Morrison
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

Toni Morrison
Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.

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
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

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

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

Toni Morrison
If she never learns how to be a daughter, she can't never learn how to be a woman.

Toni Morrison
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now _that_ was freedom.

Toni Morrison
Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

Toni Morrison
You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

Toni Morrison