Toni Morrison

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

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.
Toni Morrison

Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Toni Morrison

But I do not thing black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.
Toni Morrison

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

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither....So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
Toni Morrison

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

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
Toni Morrison

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

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.
Toni Morrison

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.
Toni Morrison

The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend.
Toni Morrison

Aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women. Black women seem able to combine the nest and adventure. They don't see conflicts in certain areas as do white women.
Toni Morrison

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

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

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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens -- that letting go -- you let go because you can. The world will always be there -- while you sleep it will be there -- when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake.
Toni Morrison

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
Toni Morrison

New York is the last true city.
Toni Morrison

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

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison

I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.
Toni Morrison

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

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

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.
Toni Morrison

How can I say things that are pictures?
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Like every other book, it would be confined by a cover and limited to type. Nevertheless, it had to have?for want of a better word?a sound, a very special sound. A sound made up of all the elements that distinguished black life (its peculiar brand of irony, oppression, versatility, madness, joy, strength, shame, honor, triumph, grace and stillness) as well as those qualities that identified it with all of mankind (compassion, anger, foolishness, courage, self-deception and vision). And it must concentrate on life as lived-not as imagined-by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak.
Toni Morrison, The Black Book

Like every other book, it would be confined by a cover and limited to type. Nevertheless, it had to have?for want of a better word?a sound, a very special sound. A sound made up of all the elements that distinguished black life (its peculiar brand of irony, oppression, versatility, madness, joy, strength, shame, honor, triumph, grace and stillness) as well as those qualities that identified it with all of mankind (compassion, anger, foolishness, courage, self-deception and vision). And it must concentrate on life as lived-not as imagined-by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak.
Toni Morrison, The Black Book

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.
Toni Morrison, Tony Morrison by Linden Peach

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he [T.M.?s father] believed that harmony could never exist between the races.
Toni Morrison, Tony Morrison by Linden Peach

No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly?You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction?And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his own way.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

You said, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and harm them not.' Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sitting on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God?That's why I changed the little black girl's eyes for her?I did what You could not do. I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her. I played You.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

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.
Toni Morrison, Kindred

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison, Conversations with American Writers

Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture

I was thrilled that my mother is still alive and can share this with me. And I can claim representation in so many areas. I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture

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.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
Toni Morrison, Newsweek interviewl

Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon