Toni Morrison Quotes

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

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

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

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

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

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

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

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

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

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

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.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You are your best thing

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

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

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

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

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.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

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

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

All important things are hard.

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.

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

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

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.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.