Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Is that what happened? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.”

— Toni Morrison

452. “I don’t do the things other people call “play.””

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

454. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

455. “Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.”

— Toni Morrison

456. “Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.”

— Toni Morrison

457. “There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

459. “Except for Adam I don’t know anything about love. Adam had no faults, was innocent, pure, easy to love. Had he lived, grown up to have flaws, human failings like deception, foolishness and ignorance, would he be so easy to adore or be even worthy of adoration? What kind of love is it that requires an angel and only an angel for its commitment?”

— Toni Morrison

460. “A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.”

— Toni Morrison

461. “What’s interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.”

— Toni Morrison

462. “When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.”

— Toni Morrison

463. “You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.”

— Toni Morrison

464. “Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That’s where we live. And that’s where the juices come from and that’s where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.”

— Toni Morrison

465. “What he might call cowardice other people called common sense.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

467. “Write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared, ever.”

— Toni Morrison

468. “The kind of clarity crazy people demand from the not-crazy.”

— Toni Morrison

469. “Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.”

— Toni Morrison

470. “For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.”

— Toni Morrison

471. “She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.”

— Toni Morrison

472. “He couldn’t stay there surrounded by a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear.”

— Toni Morrison

473. “He dragged her under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton.”

— Toni Morrison

474. “Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you.”

— Toni Morrison

475. “Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain.”

— Toni Morrison

476. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

477. “The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.”

— Toni Morrison

478. “Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.”

— Toni Morrison

479. “Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present – intolerable – and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.”

— Toni Morrison

480. “How can I take crime shows seriously where the female detectives track killers in Louboutin heels?”

— Toni Morrison

481. “Grownups don’t pay it much attention because they can’t imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.”

— Toni Morrison

482. “I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”

— Toni Morrison

483. “How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject – advertisement. The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.”

— Toni Morrison

484. “Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

486. “He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since – no matter what business venture he thinks up.”

— Toni Morrison

487. “Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.”

— Toni Morrison

488. “She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.”

— Toni Morrison

489. “You can’t protect her every minute.”

— Toni Morrison

490. “Don’t nobody have to die if they don’t want to. – Pilate.”

— Toni Morrison

491. “She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.”

— Toni Morrison

492. “It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?”

— Toni Morrison

493. “God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did.”

— Toni Morrison

494. “In a way she was jealous of death.”

— Toni Morrison

495. “I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.”

— Toni Morrison

496. “He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.”

— Toni Morrison

497. “He said, ‘Always. Always.”

— Toni Morrison

498. “No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free. DENVER’S SECRETS were sweet.”

— Toni Morrison

499. “Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.” Joe Trace.”

— Toni Morrison

500. “Didn’t everything on God’s earth have or acquire defense?”

— Toni Morrison