Toni Morrison quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Toni Morrison on Wise Famous Quotes.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

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

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.

A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy

The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved's side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe's smile.

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.

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.

You your own best thing."
-Paul D.

Write at the edges of the day.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.
Neither one had spoken a word.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

My sex life became sort of like Diet Coke - deceptively sweet minus nutrition.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman.

Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before.

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.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles

124 was spiteful.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

You have pissed your last in this house ... and I don't make velvet roses anymore.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate.

He licked his lips. 'Well, if you want my opinion-'
'I don't, ' She said. 'I have my own.

If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.

Solitude, competitiveness and grief are the unavoidable lot of a writer only when there is no organization or network to which he can turn.

Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

People who die bad don't stay in the ground.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me

his mild cynicism morphed into depression.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

he left her like a skunk leaves a smell.

All art is knowing when to stop.

And for a reason he still did not understand, he began to cry. Love plain, simple, and so fast it shattered him.

The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.

What you want to be when you grow up?" Thomas turned the knob with his left hand and opened the door. "A man," he said and left.

More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?

God take what He would, she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.

It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated - hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain.

The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.

Something that is loved is never lost.

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

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below.

It's not about choosing somebody over her. It's about making space for somebody along with her.

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.

New York is the last true city.

Much handled things are always soft(27).

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

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

You revel in the smoke that the words send up.

All important things are hard.

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

Well, if a man don't HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance!

God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

How can I take crime shows seriously where the female detectives track killers in Louboutin heels?

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

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.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

I always know the ending; that's where I start.

I don't want to be free of you because I am alive only with you.

The girl's face was as tight and mean as broccoli

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

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.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Her color is a cross she will always carry.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

Lay my head on the railroad line,
Train come along, pacify my mind.