Toni Morrison Quotes

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

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

you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

Much handled things are always soft(27).

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.

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

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.

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

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

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

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

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. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of "chosen-ness" and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

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

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

The children - I call them children when they're under 18 - are hungry for that love. The drugs are just a sleep that you can't even wake up from, because you might remember what you did when you were there. There's no place for them - there should be a rehabilitation center on every corner, along with McDonald's and the banks. This is serious business. The waiting lists are incredible. I mean, it's terrible. It's really terrible.

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.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

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

I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.

It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.