Toni Morrison Quotes

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

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

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

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.

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

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

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

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.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

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

New York is the last true city.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.

Being able to laugh got me through.

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.

Laughter is more serious than tears.

I always know the ending; that's where I start.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

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.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Something that is loved is never lost.

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.

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

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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