Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Toni Morrison
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Toni Morrison
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Toni Morrison
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Toni Morrison
If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Toni Morrison
I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

Toni Morrison
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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