Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

153. “I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color – light, black, in-between – as the marker for race is really an error.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

155. “No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.”

— Toni Morrison

156. “Laughter is more serious than tears.”

— Toni Morrison

157. “Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

159. “I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people’s doing good work.”

— Toni Morrison

160. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

164. “Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.”

— Toni Morrison

165. “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

166. “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

167. “Write at the edges of the day.”

— Toni Morrison

168. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”

— Toni Morrison

173. “I like marriage. The idea.”

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Toni Morrison

175. “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

180. “We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.”

— Toni Morrison

181. “Yummy food, unique attention, playfulness, or loving sternness – these features are often summoned to sweeten one’s memory of a grandmother.”

— Toni Morrison

182. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Toni Morrison

185. “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

186. “Lonely was much better than alone.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

196. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

198. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

200. “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