Toni Morrison's Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Toni Morrison's
Toni Morrison's Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Toni Morrison's quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
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
Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
— Toni Morrison
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
— Toni Morrison
The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved's side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe's smile.
— Toni Morrison
If I'm here ... you can go anywhere you want. Jump if you want to. 'Cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall.
— Toni Morrison
I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
— Toni Morrison
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.
— Toni Morrison
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
— Toni Morrison
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
— Toni Morrison
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
— Toni Morrison
Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.
— 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.
— Toni Morrison
What's fair ain't necessarily right.
— Toni Morrison
I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
— Toni Morrison
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
— Toni Morrison
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.
— Toni Morrison
124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom
— Toni Morrison
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
— 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
They shoot the white girl first.
— Toni Morrison
Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me ... my lonely is mine.
— Toni Morrison
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
— Toni Morrison
I was physically revolted by and secretly frightened of those round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair.
— Toni Morrison
You couldn't learn age, but adulthood was there for all.
— Toni Morrison
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
— Toni Morrison
If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.
— Toni Morrison
We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.
— Toni Morrison
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
— Toni Morrison
If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison
— Sean Liburd
You revel in the smoke that the words send up.
— Toni Morrison
I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.
— Toni Morrison
Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own.
— Toni Morrison
I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness
— Toni Morrison
Amy dragged her eyes over Sethe's face as though she would never give out so confidential a piece of information as that to a perfect stranger.
— Toni Morrison
Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.
— Toni Morrison
There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.
— Toni Morrison
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
— Toni Morrison
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
— Toni Morrison
The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
— Toni Morrison
Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible.
— Toni Morrison
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
— Toni Morrison
For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It's not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives. #bestallnighterever
— Toni Morrison
It's not about choosing somebody over her. It's about making space for somebody along with her.
— Toni Morrison
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else's child, do your eyes light up? That's what they're looking for.
— Toni Morrison
The girl's face was as tight and mean as broccoli
— Toni Morrison
I always know the ending; that's where I start.
— Toni Morrison
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
— Toni Morrison
124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For
— Toni Morrison
You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.
— Toni Morrison
If I did I didn't know it. What's it like, velvet?''Well, Lu, velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth. — Toni Morrison
When a man angers you, he conquers you.
— 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?
— Toni Morrison
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
— Toni Morrison
You want a real thing?" asked Alice. "I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.
— Toni Morrison
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.
— Toni Morrison
An editor is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one then you are better off alone.
— Toni Morrison
Laughter is more serious than tears.
— Toni Morrison
Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
— Toni Morrison
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
— Toni Morrison
And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.
— Toni Morrison
I like marriage. The idea.
— Toni Morrison
Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
— Toni Morrison
You are your best thing
— Toni Morrison
Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder
— Toni Morrison
If there is somebody with bluer eyes than mine, then maybe there is somebody with the bluest eyes. The bluest eyes in the whole world.
— Toni Morrison
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
— Toni Morrison
Being able to laugh got me through.
— Toni Morrison
The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.
— Toni Morrison
All important things are hard.
— Toni Morrison
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.
— Toni Morrison
Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world
— Toni Morrison
I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the "problem" as anything other than an artistic one.
— Toni Morrison
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
— Toni Morrison
In a way she was jealous of death.
— Toni Morrison
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
— Toni Morrison
We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.
— Toni Morrison
There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.
— Toni Morrison
God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.
— Toni Morrison
