Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”

— Toni Morrison

202. “No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”

— Toni Morrison

203. “Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.”

— Toni Morrison

204. “He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit––this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.”

— Toni Morrison

205. “Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.”

— Toni Morrison

206. “No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.”

— Toni Morrison

207. “There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.”

— Toni Morrison

208. “Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.”

— Toni Morrison

209. “There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.”

— Toni Morrison

210. “Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses – young loving.”

— Toni Morrison

211. “There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”

— Toni Morrison

212. “Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.”

— Toni Morrison

213. “As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. 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.”

— Toni Morrison

214. “What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”

— Toni Morrison

215. “In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”

— Toni Morrison

216. “Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.”

— Toni Morrison

217. “Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

— Toni Morrison

218. “Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”

— Toni Morrison

219. “Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.”

— Toni Morrison

220. “Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.”

— Toni Morrison

221. “Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.”

— Toni Morrison

222. “The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die.”

— Toni Morrison

223. “If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.”

— Toni Morrison

224. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”

— Toni Morrison

225. “Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.”

— Toni Morrison

226. “He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now, that was freedom.”

— Toni Morrison

227. “Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How ’bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?”

— Toni Morrison

228. “One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.”

— Toni Morrison

229. “When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?”

— Toni Morrison

230. “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.”

— Toni Morrison

231. “She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her – and the humor with which to live it.”

— Toni Morrison

232. “Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.”

— Toni Morrison

233. “There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.”

— Toni Morrison

234. “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.”

— Toni Morrison

235. “Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

— Toni Morrison

236. “I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.”

— Toni Morrison

237. “When we trip and fall down they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration. How, they ask us, do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick? We cannot answer them. Our illness is treated with contempt, foul Black Draught, and castor oil that blunts our minds.”

— Toni Morrison

238. “Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

— Toni Morrison

239. “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

— Toni Morrison

240. “The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.”

— Toni Morrison

241. “Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.”

— Toni Morrison

242. “No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.”

— Toni Morrison

243. “Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

— Toni Morrison

244. “I don’t work. I keep telling people I’m unemployed. And I don’t wash dishes, and I don’t wash clothes, and I don’t clean my house. Somebody else does that.”

— Toni Morrison

245. “I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”

— Toni Morrison

246. “Adults do not talk to us – they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information.”

— Toni Morrison

247. “The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.”

— Toni Morrison

248. “Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence.”

— Toni Morrison

249. “The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices.”

— Toni Morrison

250. “And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.”

— Toni Morrison