Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

53. “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”

— Toni Morrison

54. “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”

— Toni Morrison

55. “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

57. “Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.”

— Toni Morrison

58. “I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.”

— Toni Morrison

59. “I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.”

— Toni Morrison

60. “A coward with a gun is the most dangerous person in the world.”

— Toni Morrison

61. “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

— Toni Morrison

62. “You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.”

— Toni Morrison

63. “A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy.”

— Toni Morrison

64. “When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.”

— Toni Morrison

65. “And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”

— Toni Morrison

66. “I tell my students there is such a thing as ‘writer’s block,’ and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

68. “If you can’t count, they can cheat you. If you can’t read, they can beat you.”

— Toni Morrison

69. “Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”

— Toni Morrison

70. “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”

— Toni Morrison

71. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”

— Toni Morrison

72. “Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.”

— Toni Morrison

73. “Passion is never enough; neither is skill.”

— Toni Morrison

74. “When a man angers you, he conquers you.”

— Toni Morrison

75. “People say to write about what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared, ever.”

— Toni Morrison

76. “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”

— Toni Morrison

77. “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

79. “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”

— Toni Morrison

80. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

81. “Being able to laugh got me through.”

— Toni Morrison

82. “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”

— Toni Morrison

83. “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

85. “I get angry about things, then go on and work.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

87. “If you take racism away from certain people – I mean vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist – if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible – misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.”

— Toni Morrison

88. “Love is never any better than the lover.”

— Toni Morrison

89. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

90. “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

91. “Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.”

— Toni Morrison

92. “I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have answers to.”

— Toni Morrison

93. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

94. “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”

— Toni Morrison

95. “Birth, life, and death – each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.”

— Toni Morrison

96. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

— Toni Morrison

97. “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

98. “If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.”

— Toni Morrison

99. “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

— Toni Morrison

100. “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