Toni Morrison Quotes

Much handled things are always soft(27).

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

Love is divine only and difficult always.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

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

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

The Administration of the United States is such dread I almost feel paralyzed.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

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.

I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.

I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.

I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.

I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.

It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

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.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

It's gonna hurt, now, " said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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

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

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in., March 9, 1998]

You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore.

Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.

Her passions were narrow but deep.

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

Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.