Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.
Toni MorrisonI would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
Toni MorrisonListen up. Let me tell you something. A man ainโt a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he canโt chop down because theyโre inside.
Toni MorrisonI have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
Toni Morrison...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.
Toni MorrisonAll the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don't know what it is, I don't know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know what that thing might be, but I don't want to. Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can't happen again and my mother won't have to kill me too.
Toni Morrison