Toni Morrison quotes:

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  • I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

  • 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.

  • Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

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

  • 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.

  • Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

  • 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?

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

  • If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

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

  • Hunched down in the small bright room Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead father, but a deeply personal cry for one's own pain. A loud, strident: 'Why me?' She waited.

  • The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

  • I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Make up a storyFor 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.

  • Naturally all of them had a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked."

  • Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."

  • I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles"

  • Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

  • We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.

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

  • 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.

  • It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

  • Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

  • Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

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

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

  • 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.

  • A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

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

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

  • Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

  • 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.

  • ...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.

  • Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.

  • It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

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

  • Laughter is more serious than tears.

  • What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.

  • 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.

  • She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

  • Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.

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

  • In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

  • Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

  • Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

  • 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.

  • ...a habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

  • 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.

  • Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

  • Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

  • Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.

  • Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.

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

  • Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

  • At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

  • 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.

  • Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

  • You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

  • The things that help you sleep all the way through it. Back-breaking labor might do it; or liquor. Surely a body -- friendly if not familiar -- lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgusts, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.

  • Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • He can't value you more than you value yourself.

  • The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.

  • 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.

  • The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.

  • The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.

  • Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.

  • Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.

  • Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

  • Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.

  • Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

  • 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.

  • There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap.

  • She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.

  • I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.

  • 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.

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

  • Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

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

  • Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

  • So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

  • Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information.

  • 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.

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