Toni Morrison Quotes

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

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

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

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?

If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

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

If we had no language we'd have nothing.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.

Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.

My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

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

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

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.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

All art is knowing when to stop.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

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

Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

Lonely was much better than alone.

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

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

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

I am a moralist. I worry.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?

Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.