Toni Morrison Quotes

“If you don’t understand your past, you can’t transcend it, you might repeat it, you don’t understand half of your life. Knowledge is what’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things is the enemy, patriarchy in medicine, patriarchy in schools, or in literature.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“Writing for the gallery is something that a writer must resist no matter who he is. You know the writers that are writing for their audience because they write the same book over and over again with the sort of cute things their readership likes. Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.”
― Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“Because I think we forget something about slavery: There was an enormous amount of sexual license. People talk about, well, the money; the economy; the this…But you realize if you own a human being, you really own them. You can get them—boys, girls—to do anything you say, on pain of death. That’s what it means to own a human being.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“But I am convinced that the more I am well known—the better known I am—the easier it is for other writers to come along. If I till that soil myself, in publicity, travelling around Europe, selling books, lecturing, what have you, then all of the younger people who won’t have to break down those same doors, they’ll be open. They will write infinitely better than I do. They will write of all sorts of things that no one writer can ever touch. They will be stronger, and they will be delicious to read. But part of that availability and accessibility is because six or seven black women writers, among whom I am one, have already been there and tilled the soil.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking. “This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“I mean, that the New World black woman needs a little of the Old World black woman in her, and the other way around. I don’t think that they are completely fulfilled without the other.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can’t exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations