quotes by Toni Morrison

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

"Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous"
— Toni Morrison (Sula)

"'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.'"
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away"
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"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 that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
— Toni Morrison

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

"Love is never any better than the lover. "
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom."
— Toni Morrison

"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

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

"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. "
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"‘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:] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!’"
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

"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 (Beloved)

"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 (Beloved)

"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 (Song of Solomon)

"You are your best thing"
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
- Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993"
— Toni Morrison

" ‘How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked.
‘Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff:]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff:] that weighs you down.’
The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.
"
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

"They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations..."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

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

"Lonely was much better than alone"
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"He wants to put his story next to hers."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

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

"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."
— Toni Morrison

"Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” "
— Toni Morrison

"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it."
— Toni Morrison

"...the change was adjustment without improvement."
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world"
— Toni Morrison

"the hopelessnes that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)"
— Toni Morrison (Jazz)

"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.
"
— Toni Morrison

"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 (Sula)

"What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?"
— Toni Morrison (Jazz)

"I’m crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out."
— Toni Morrison (Jazz)

"guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness."
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*"
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon: A Novel)

"Sethe's crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"Pain. 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 Morrison (Jazz)

"A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick."
— Toni Morrison

"Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There was’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool–the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild–like life in the raw."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us who knew her felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness."
— Toni Morrison

"A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. "
— Toni Morrison (Tar Baby)

"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 (The Bluest Eye)

""O Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl,girl,girlgirlgirl."
It was a fine cry--loudand long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow."
— Toni Morrison (Sula)

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

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

""If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it." "
— Toni Morrison

" “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.""
— Toni Morrison

""If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.""
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

"A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do."
— Toni Morrison (Jazz)