Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.
Toni MorrisonIt 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 MorrisonSome things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.
Toni MorrisonWell, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
Toni MorrisonI 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.
Toni MorrisonThey seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their mindsโ cooled โand spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
Toni MorrisonI know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, Iโm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
Toni MorrisonEvery now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.
Toni MorrisonThis is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
Toni MorrisonI have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
Toni MorrisonIn Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni MorrisonFor lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
Toni MorrisonThere are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That's why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they're interested in. Art might do something. It's dangerous.
Toni MorrisonDid you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
Toni MorrisonA lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Toni MorrisonThe language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
Toni MorrisonAt 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 MorrisonHospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Toni MorrisonIt was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
Toni MorrisonWhen a child walks in the room, your child or anybody elseโs child, do your eyes light up? Thatโs what theyโre looking for.
Toni MorrisonThe best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni MorrisonI have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.
Toni MorrisonWe mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Toni MorrisonBlack people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni MorrisonShe left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.
Toni MorrisonIt had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
Toni MorrisonAdults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signsยall the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
Toni MorrisonPain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
Toni MorrisonIntimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
Toni MorrisonI am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naรฏve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Toni Morrison