Toni Morrison

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

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

“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.”

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

“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.”

“There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.”

“In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.”

“Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”

“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we”.”

“I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of t...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?”

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

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

“Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.”

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

“For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.”

“One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.”

“The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.”

“I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.”

“Make a difference about something other than yourselves.”

“It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.”

“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.”

“When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.”

“I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turni...”

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or biso...”

“Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.”

“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”

“It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege o...”

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

“See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] sai...”

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

“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?”

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

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

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. An...”

“Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you “fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I’m not saying this because I need a place to stay. That’s the last thing I need. I told you, I’m a walking man, but I been heading in...”

“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It...”

“Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

“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.”

“Passion is never enough; neither is skill.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is...”

“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.”

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

“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.”