Toni Morrison Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Toni Morrison
The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided — something about their presence is constructive in the long run.

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

Toni Morrison
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

Toni Morrison
A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

Toni Morrison