Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Quotes About Giving

3. “When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.”

— Toni Morrison

4. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

5. “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

— Toni Morrison

6. “You are your best thing.”

— Toni Morrison

7. “Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.”

— Toni Morrison

8. “Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”

— Toni Morrison

9. “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

— Toni Morrison

10. “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

— Toni Morrison

11. “I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.”

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

12. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

14. “All art is knowing when to stop.”

— Toni Morrison

15. “All important things are hard.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Meaning Of Life Quotes

17. “Make a difference about something other than yourselves.”

— Toni Morrison

18. “Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.”

— Toni Morrison

19. “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

— Toni Morrison

20. “In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.”

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Artist Quotes

21. “The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.”

— Toni Morrison

22. “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

— Toni Morrison

23. “If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

25. “Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

27. “Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

29. “Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.”

— Toni Morrison

30. “Something that is loved is never lost.”

— Toni Morrison

31. “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

— Toni Morrison

32. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

33. “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”

— Toni Morrison

34. “It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

— Toni Morrison

35. “Let your face speak what’s in your heart.”

— Toni Morrison

36. “The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.”

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

37. “Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”

— Toni Morrison

38. “I always know the ending; that’s where I start.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

41. “I dream a dream that dreams back at me.”

— Toni Morrison

42. “You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.”

— Toni Morrison

43. “A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.”

— Toni Morrison

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

46. “Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.”

— Toni Morrison

47. “Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined.”

— Toni Morrison

48. “Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.”

— Toni Morrison

49. “The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”

— Toni Morrison

50. “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.”

— Toni Morrison