Toni Morrison Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist, writer

Born: February 18, 1931

Died:

Toni Morrison born as Chloe Ardelia Wofford is an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "Sula" (1973), "Song of Solomon" (1977), and "Beloved "(1987).

Toni Morrison Quotes

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.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

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

Make up a story... 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.

Writing is really a way of thinking-not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

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

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.

He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

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

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.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'

Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

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.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

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?

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

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

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

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

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.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.

She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.

Naturally all of them had a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

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

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved-from a distance, though-and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

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.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

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

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

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.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.

She is a friend of 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.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

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

The best thing she was, was her children.

Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

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

Her passions were narrow but deep.

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

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.

I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye.

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