Toni Morrison Quotes

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

I like marriage. The idea.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.

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.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.

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

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

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

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

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

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

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.

Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done.

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.

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.

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

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

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.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

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

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

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.

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.

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?

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

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 happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.