Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Laughter is more serious than tears.”

— Toni Morrison

152. “I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that’s what an artist is-a politician.”

— Toni Morrison

153. “I thought the whole world was like Lorain.”

— Toni Morrison

154. “I couldn’t bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.”

— Toni Morrison

155. “Good is knowing when to stop.”

— Toni Morrison

156. “If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

— Toni Morrison

157. “Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”

— Toni Morrison

158. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” 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

159. “For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

— Toni Morrison

160. “But stars can explode, disappear. Besides, what we see when we look at them may no longer be there. Some could have died thousands of years ago and we’re just now getting their light. Old information looking like news.”

— Toni Morrison

161. “Write at the edges of the day.”

— Toni Morrison

162. “I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles.”

— Toni Morrison

163. “Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.”

— Toni Morrison

164. “He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.”

— Toni Morrison

165. “Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning – not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.”

— Toni Morrison

166. “But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life.”

— Toni Morrison

167. “I like marriage. The idea.”

— Toni Morrison

168. “The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it.”

— Toni Morrison

169. “This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn’t matter to me what your position is. You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you’ve got.”

— Toni Morrison

170. “You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.”

— Toni Morrison

171. “I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.”

— Toni Morrison

172. “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.”

— Toni Morrison

173. “The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.”

— Toni Morrison

174. “As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”

— Toni Morrison

175. “Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.”

— Toni Morrison

176. “Lonely, ain’t it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”

— Toni Morrison

177. “Lonely was much better than alone.”

— Toni Morrison

178. “We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

— Toni Morrison

179. “The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”

— Toni Morrison

180. “New York is the last true city.”

— Toni Morrison

181. “Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.”

— Toni Morrison

182. “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs – all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.”

— Toni Morrison

183. “My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it’s the only place where I am that I never think about when I’m leaving.”

— Toni Morrison

184. “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”

— Toni Morrison

185. “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.”

— Toni Morrison

186. “Sweet, she thought. He must think I can’t bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, “goodbye” would break me to pieces. Ain’t that sweet. “So long,” she murmured from the far side of the trees.”

— Toni Morrison

187. “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”

— Toni Morrison

188. “You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.”

— Toni Morrison

189. “It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

— Toni Morrison

190. “I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.”

— Toni Morrison

191. “Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.”

— Toni Morrison

192. “The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has “legs,” so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.”

— Toni Morrison

193. “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

— Toni Morrison

194. “Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep – to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other:.”

— Toni Morrison

195. “You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn’t take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.”

— Toni Morrison

196. “Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.”

— Toni Morrison

197. “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”

— Toni Morrison

198. “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?”

— Toni Morrison

199. “Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”

— Toni Morrison

200. “She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.”

— Toni Morrison