Toni Morrison famous quotes

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

#Artist #Silent #Dread

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
-- Toni Morrison

#Racism #People #Gone

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

#Love #Inspiring #Sad Love

Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
-- Toni Morrison

#Men #Feminist #Black

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Broken Heart #Running #Men

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
-- Toni Morrison

#Important #Want #Intimacy

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
-- Toni Morrison

#Definitions #Beloved

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
-- Toni Morrison

#Reading #Writing #Thinking

One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
-- Toni Morrison

#Writing #Giving #Said

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Jobs #Struggle #Book

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 Morrison

#Children #Littles #Next

When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.
-- Toni Morrison

#Girl #Struggle #Boys

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Friendship #Real Friends #Men

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. Physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.
-- Toni Morrison

#Mother #Breakup #Country

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
-- Toni Morrison

#Circles #Long #Sorrow

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible - misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.
-- Toni Morrison

#Pain #Mean #Self

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
-- Toni Morrison

My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.
-- Toni Morrison

#Home #Thinking #Space

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
-- Toni Morrison

#Doors #Misery #Awake

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Memories #Home #People

Love is never any better than the lover.
-- Toni Morrison

#Love Is #Lovers

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
-- Toni Morrison

#Isolation #Utopia

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays
-- Toni Morrison

#Hard Work #Writing #Differences

Love is divine only and difficult always.
-- Toni Morrison

#Love Is #Divine #Difficult

The function of freedom is to free someone else.
-- Toni Morrison

#Love #Responsibility #Revolutionary

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race -- scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
-- Toni Morrison

#Race #Racism #Social

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

#Love #Fall #Thinking

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 Morrison

#Art #Media #Class

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
-- Toni Morrison

#Freedom #Self #Ownership

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - 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

#Art #Journey #Cost

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Beauty #Thank You #Photography

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
-- Toni Morrison

#Sister #Sibling #Special

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

#Difficult #Refuge #Handle

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

#Inspirational #Dream #Thinking

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

#Inspirational #Happiness #Attitude

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

#Fear #Boys #Black

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

#Inspiring #Goes On #Angry

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
-- Toni Morrison

#Inspirational #Women #Differences

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge-even wisdom. Like art.
-- Toni Morrison

#Art #Pain #Important

The writing is - I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.
-- Toni Morrison

#Pain #Writing #Imagination

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Jobs #Freedom #Real

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Writing #Self #Civilization

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

#Nature #Memories #Reality

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Self #Tests #Strange

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
-- Toni Morrison

#White #Everything Happens For A Reason #Profound

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.
-- Toni Morrison

#Responsibility #Leader #Taking Responsibility

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

#Decision #Want #Safe

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

#Giving Up #Giving #Want

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
-- Toni Morrison

#Art #Waiting #Waiting For You

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
-- Toni Morrison

#Writing #Firsts #Novel

And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
-- Toni Morrison

#Moving #Dark #Night

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
-- Toni Morrison

#Games #Snakes #Lions

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
-- Toni Morrison

#Loneliness #Feet #Skins

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
-- Toni Morrison

#Country #Women #Differences

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.
-- Toni Morrison

#Book #Writing #Doors

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

#Connotation #Rely #Sentences

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Romantic Love #Ideas #Envy

I like marriage. The idea.
-- Toni Morrison

#Funny #Witty #Fun

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
-- Toni Morrison

#Equality #Sisterhood #Two

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

#Writing #Thinking #Vision

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

#Writing #World #Done

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

#Country #War #Class

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

#Communication #May #Meaning Of Life

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
-- Toni Morrison

#Sympathy #Pain #Suffering

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

#People #Exclusion #Racist

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
-- Toni Morrison

#Black #Limits #Violence

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

#Reality #Lovely #Awareness

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?
-- Toni Morrison

#Gratitude #Hurt #Beer

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one.
-- Toni Morrison

#Commitment #Justice #Not Good Enough

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Art #Order #Restoration

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

#Destiny #Views #Waiting

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
-- Toni Morrison

#Baby #Writing #Way

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.
-- Toni Morrison

#Civilization #Space #Inspire

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
-- Toni Morrison

#Beautiful #Art #Political

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

#People #Paradise #Utopia

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder
-- Toni Morrison

#Knowing #Not Knowing #Beloved

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
-- Toni Morrison

#Thinking #Diversity #Mind

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
-- Toni Morrison

#Beautiful #Order #Pieces

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
-- Toni Morrison

#Responsibility #Hands #Bird

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
-- Toni Morrison

#Inspiration #Writing

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
-- Toni Morrison

#Block #Writing #Students

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Lying #Miracle #Magic

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

#Struggle #Mean #Ethnicity

The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
-- Toni Morrison

#Art #Years #Racism

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
-- Toni Morrison

#Thinking #People #Perception

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
-- Toni Morrison

#Art #Civilization #Drawing

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
-- Toni Morrison

#Writing #House #Type

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Self #Hands #Naked

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
-- Toni Morrison

#Mean #Black #Black Women

Well, 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 Morrison

#Sleep #Worry #Each Day

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.
-- Toni Morrison

#Writing #Ideas #Answers

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
-- Toni Morrison

#Country #Falling In Love #Self

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Power #Thinking #Names

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.
-- Toni Morrison

#Thinking #Past #Way

I dream a dream that dreams back at me
-- Toni Morrison

#Dream

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
-- Toni Morrison

#Air

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
-- Toni Morrison

#Loneliness #Profound #Silence

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
-- Toni Morrison

#Sister #Sweet #Crazy

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
-- Toni Morrison

#Hurt #Coming Back #Life Hurts

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
-- Toni Morrison

#Views #People #Done