Top 431 Quotes & Sayings by Toni Morrison

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

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

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.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

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

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

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

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

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

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

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.

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.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

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

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

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

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?

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.

I like marriage. The idea.

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

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.

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

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

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.

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.

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

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

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

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.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

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

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

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.

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

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

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.